THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 
OF  CALIFORNIA 

IN  MEMORY  OF 


Professor  Aram  Torossian 
1884-1941 


V 


i 


A  STUDY  OF  THE  DKAMA 


BY 


BRANDER  ^  MATTHEWS 

V_- 

PROFESSOR  OF  DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  IN  COLUMBIA 

UNIVERSITY,   MEMBER  OF   THE  AMERICAN 

ACADEMY  OF  ARTS  AND  LETTERS 


BOSTON   NEW  YORK  AND  CHICAGO 

HOUGHTON  MIFFLIN  COMPANY 
Cambrib0e 


COPYRIGHT,   IpIO,  BY  BRANDER  MATTHEW 
ALL  RIGHTS  RESERVED 


Published  March  IQIO 


PA/ 


THIS  ANALYSIS  OF  AN  ART 
IN  WHICH  HIS  COUNTRYMEN  HAVE  LONG 
EXCELLED  IS  GRATEFULLY  INSCRIBED  TO 

JULES  JUSSERAND 

AMBASSADOR   OF  THE    FRENCH    REPUBLIC 
AND  HISTORIAN  OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE 


777 


PREFATORY  NOTE 

THIS  book  is  a  study  of  the  technic  of  the  drama.  It 
is  intended,  not  for  those  who  want  to  write  plays,  but 
for  those  who  wish  to  learn  how  plays  are  written  now, 
and  how  they  have  been  written  in  the  past.  It  is  the 
result  of  a  belief  that  the  fundamental  principles  of 
the  drama  are  the  same  throughout  the  ages,  and  that 
they  can  be  discovered  as  well  in  the  plays  of  Sophocles 
as  in  the  plays  of  Shakspere,  as  well  in  the  plays  of 
Moliere  as  in  the  plays  of  Ibsen.  And  therefore  the 
author  has  not  confined  his  attention  to  the  English 
drama  alone;  he  has  preferred  to  consider  the  whole 
history  of  the  theater,  ancient  and  medieval  and  mod- 
ern, in  the  belief  that  this  is  the  only  method  which 
will  result  in  a  real  understanding  of  the  dramatic 
practices  of  any  particular  period  and  of  any  particular 
people.  He  has  held  fast  also  to  the  conviction  that 
all  the  masterpieces  of  the  dramatic  art  were  originally 
written  to  be  performed  by  actors,  in  a  theater,  and 
before  an  audience  of  the  dramatist's  own  contem- 
poraries; and  he  has  therefore  kept  in  mind  always 
the  theatrical  circumstances  which  conditioned  the 
work  of  the  dramatist.  In  other  words,  this  study  is 
devoted  mainly  to  an  examination  of  the  structural 
framework  which  the  great  dramatists  of  various  epochs 
have  given  to  their  plays;  and  it  discusses  only  inci- 
dentally the  psychology,  the  philosophy,  and  the  po- 
etry which  we  now  admire  in  these  pieces.  Although 
the  author  had  no  intention  of  neglecting  the  content 


vi  PREFATORY  NOTE 

of  the  masterpieces  of  the  drama,  he  has  centered  his 
attention  rather  on  the  form  wherein  this  content  is 
presented,  since  it  is  only  by  so  doing  that  he  can  set 
before  the  student  certain  of  the  secrets  of  the  art  of  the 


In  the  preparation  of  this  volume,  in  which  he  has 
endeavored  to  consider  the  differing  aspects  of  the 
playwright's  craft,  the  author  has  availed  himself  freely 
of  the  various  papers  which  he  has  published  during 
the  past  few  years  in  the  North  American  Review  and 
the  Forum,  the  Atlantic  and  the  Century,  Scribner's  and 
Putnam' *s ;  but,  of  course,  this  material  has  been  un- 
hesitatingly rehandled  to  adjust  it  to  the  ampler  scheme 
of  this  more  comprehensive  treatment  of  the  subject. 

The  author  takes  pleasure  in  recording  here  his 
indebtedness  to  the  friends  who  have  kindly  lent  him 
their  aid  as  this  book  was  passing  through  the  press, 
—  Professors  Ashley  H.  Thorndike  and  William  W. 
Lawrence  of  Columbia  University,  and  Professor 
Charles  Sears  Baldwin  of  Yale  University. 

B.  M. 

COLUMBIA  UNIVERSITY 

IN  THE  CITY  OF  NEW  YORK 

February  21,  1910. 


CONTENTS 

I.  THE  STUDY  OP  THE  DRAMA    ....      1 

II.  THE  INFLUENCE  OP  THE  ACTOR  ...        24 

III.  THE  INFLUENCE  OP  THE  THEATER         .        .    44 

IV.  THE  INFLUENCE  OP  THE  AUDIENCE     .        .        68 
V.  THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA       .        .        .        .92 

VI.  A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS        .        .        .      109 

VII.  TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS        .        .        .  132 

VIII.  DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION      .        .        .      152 

IX.  THE  LOGIC  OP  CONSTRUCTION         .       .       .  175 

X.  THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  ....      211 

XI.  THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS       .        .        .  232 

XII.    THE  POETIC  DRAMA  AND  THE  DRAMATIC 

POEM 249 

XIII.    THE  THREE  UNITIES 272 

APPENDIX 

A:  SUGGESTIONS  FOR  STUDY      ....      299 
B:  BIBLIOGRAPHICAL  SUGGESTIONS       .       .       .  302 

INDEX  309 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

Stage  of  Theater  built  by  Richelieu  in  Paris  (1639)  and 
occupied  by  Moliere  (1661-1673)    ....  Frontispiece 

1  Plan  of  the  Theater  of  Dionysus  at  Athens  ....  48 
Plan  of  the  Roman  Theater  at  Orange  .....  50 
Plan  of  the  Fortune  Theater,  London 60 

Plan  of  the  Richelieu-Moliere  Theater,  Paris      ...    60 

• 

Plan  of  the  Drury  Lane  Theater,  London      ....    60 

Plan  of  the  Empire  Theater,  New  York 60 

Remains  of  the  Theater  of  Dionysus  at  Athens  ...    74 

Restoration  of  the  Stage  of  the  Roman  Theater  at 
Orange 140 

[After  a  drawing  by  Paul  Steck,  from  the  model  in  the  Li- 
brary of  the  Opera,  Paris.] 

Stage-sets  of  the  Italian  Corned y-of-Masks  in  Seventeenth 
Century,  as  used  by  Moliere  in  many  of  his  Plays     .  172 


1  [The  plans  were  drawn  by  Albert  D.  Millar,  Esq.,  on  exactly  the 
same  scale,  thus  indicating  the  striking  difference  in  size.] 


x  ILLUSTRATIONS 

Interior  of  Drury  Lane  Theater,  London  (1808)  .    .     .192 

[From  an  aquatint  by  Thomas  Rowlandson.  This  theater 
was  substantially  identical  with  the  earlier  house  on  the 
same  site,  for  which  Sheridan  wrote  the  "School  for 
Scandal"  (1777).] 

Interior  of  the  Fortune  Theater,  London  (1599)      .    .  238 

[From  the  restoration  by  Walter  H.  Godfrey,  Esq.,  after 
the  builder's  contract.  Reproduced  (by  permission)  from 
an  article  by  William  Archer,  Esq.,  in  the  Quarterly 
Review.] 

Restoration  of  the  Stage  on  which  a  Passion-Play  was 
acted  at  Valenciennes  (1547) 292 

[From  the  model  belonging  to  Columbia  University,  New 
York.] 

Plan  of  the  Passion-Play  Stage  at  Valenciennes  .     ,    .292 


A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

CHAPTER  I 

THE  STUDY   OF  THE  DRAMA 

A  history  of  the  stage  is  no  trivial  thing  to  those  who  wish  to 
study  human  nature  in  all  shapes  and  positions.  It  is  of  all  things 
the  most  instructive,  to  see  not  only  the  reflection  of  manners  and 
characters  at  several  periods,  but  the  modes  of  making  their  reflec- 
tion, and  the  manner  of  adapting  it  at  those  periods  to  the  taste  and 
disposition  of  mankind.  The  stage  indeed  may  be  considered  as  the 
republic  of  active  literature,  and  its  history  as  the  history  of  that 
state.  The  great  events  of  political  history,  when  not  combined  with 
the  same  helps  towards  the  study  of  the  manners  and  characters  of 
men,  must  be  a  study  of  an  inferior  nature.  —  EDMUND  BURKE, 
Letter  to  Edmund  Malone. 

He  therefore  who  is  acquainted  with  the  works  which  have  pleased 
different  ages  and  different  countries,  and  has  formed  his  opinion 
upon  them,  has  more  materials,  and  more  means  of  knowing  what 
is  analogous  to  the  mind  of  man,  than  he  who  is  conversant  only  with 
the  works  of  his  own  age  or  country.  What  has  pleased,  and  con- 
tinues to  please,  is  likely  to  please  again ;  hence  are  derived  the  rules 
of  art,  and  on  this  immediate  foundation  they  must  ever  stand.  — 
SIR  JOSHUA  REYNOLDS,  Discourses  on  Painting. 


WHEN  we  approach  the  study  of  the  drama,  we  must 
begin  by  reminding  ourselves  that  this  art  does  not  lie 
wholly  within  the  limit  of  literature,  a  fact  which  makes 
investigation  into  its  principles  at  once  more  inter- 
esting and  more  difficult.  The  novel,  the  short-story, 
the  epic,  the  lyric,  the  essay,  can  all  of  them  be  weighed 
and  measured  by  purely  literary  tests ;  the  drama  can- 


2  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

not.  And  here  it  has  a  certain  resemblance  to  history 
on  the  one  hand,  and  to  oratory  on  the  other.  There  are 
not  a  few  historians  highly  esteemed  by  their  fellows 
whose  work,  however  scientific  it  may  be,  lacks  art, 
and  is  deficient  in  those  twin  qualities  of  literature 
which  we  term  structure  and  style.  There  are  public 
speakers,  able  to  move  multitudes  by  their  impas- 
sioned appeals,  whose  perfervid  addresses  when  put 
into  chill  print  seem  empty  and  inflated.  So  there  are 
playwrights  of  the  past  as  well  as  of  the  present,  many 
of  whose  pieces,  although  they  may  have  pleased  the 
vast  majority  of  playgoers  when  they  were  performed 
in  the  theater,  are  now  none  the  less  quite  unworthy 
of  serious  criticism  when  the  attempt  is  made  to  ana- 
lyze them  from  the  standpoint  of  literature  alone.  The 
success  achieved  by  these  pieces  on  the  stage  itself  is 
proof  that  they  possessed  theatrical  effectiveness,  — 
which  is  the  first  requisite  of  a  good  play.  But  even 
though  they  had  this  indispensable  quality,  they  were 
not  lifted  up  into  literature  by  any  mastery  of  structure, 
by  any  charm  of  style,  by  any  grace  of  poetry,  by  any 
sincerity  of  treatment,  or  by  any  subtlety  of  psychology. 
Pieces  of  this  kind  are  abundant  in  every  period  when 
the  theater  has  been  flourishing ;  but  they  are  the  mere 
journalism  of  the  stage.  They  are  for  their  own  day 
only,  not  for  all  time. 

We  may  even  go  further  and  point  out  that  a  panto- 
mime proves  to  us  that  there  is  at  least  one  kind  of  play 
which  can  exist  and  achieve  its  purpose  satisfactorily 
without  the  use  of  words,  and  thus  without  the  aid 
of  the  most  obvious  element  of  literature.  In  a  pan- 
tomime, we  see  a  story  told  in  action,  by  gestures  only; 
and  a  few  years  ago  an  adroit  and  inventive  French 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  3 

playwright  composed  a  play  without  words,  the  "Pro- 
digal Son,"  in  which  he  showed  that  it  was  possible  to 
make  a  pantomime  very  interesting  to  the  spectators 
in  the  theater  and  to  endow  it  with  all  the  needed  ele- 
ments of  the  drama,  especially  pathos  and  humor. 
And  the  ingenious  narratives  in  action  devised  of  late 
for  the  moving-picture  machines  are  equal  evidence  of 
the  adequacy  of  pantomime  to  tell  a  dramatic  story, 
either  serious  or  comic,  so  clearly  that  every  beholder 
can  apprehend  it  at  once. 

We  may  note  also  that  while  the  drama  does  not 
lie  wholly  within  the  limits  of  literature,  it  is  at  liberty 
to  call  to  its  aid  others  of  the  arts,  not  only  the  art  of 
the  actor,  —  with  which  the  art  of  the  playwright  must 
ever  be  most  intimately  associated,  —  but  even  the  arts 
of  the  musician,  of  the  painter,  and  of  the  sculptor.  It 
can  force  each  of  these  into  its  service  whenever  it 
wishes,  and  it  can  borrow  from  them  any  device  it  may 
need.  Not  without  good  reason  did  Wagner  assert  that 
the  music-drama  was  "the  art-work  of  the  future," 
since  the  theater  is  the  one  place  where  the  arts  may 
all  unite,  each  contributing  its  share  to  the  harmony 
of  the  whole. 

Thus  it  is  impossible  to  consider  the  drama  profit- 
ably apart  from  the  theater  in  which  it  was  born  and 
in  which  it  reveals  itself  in  its  completest  perfection. 
All  the  masterpieces  of  the  dramatic  art  were  planned 
and  elaborated  on  purpose  to  be  performed  by  actors, 
in  a  theater,  and  before  an  audience  of  the  poet's  con- 
temporaries. The  great  dramas  of  the  mighty  masters, 
without  a  single  exception,  were  intended  to  be  played 
rather  than  to  be  read ;  they  were  prepared  primarily 
for  the  stage,  and  only  secondarily  —  if  at  all  —  for 


4  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  study.  Neither  Shakspere  nor  Moliere  was  eager 
to  publish  his  immortal  plays  in  his  own  lifetime, 
seemingly  careless,  each  of  them,  in  regard  to  any 
other  judgment  than  that  which  had  been  passed  in 
the  theater  itself.  Lope  de  Vega  and  Calderon  took 
the  same  attitude.  They  had  contrived  their  plots  in 
accordance  with  the  conditions  of  the  theaters  of  their 
own  time,  the  only  conditions  with  which  they  were 
familiar ;  they  had  fitted  the  chief  parts  to  the  best  of 
their  fellow-actors ;  and  they  may  very  well  have  dis- 
trusted any  criticism  not  the  result  of  the  actual  per- 
formance under  the  special  conditions  with  which  they 
themselves  were  content.  Indeed,  Mdliere,  in  the 
preface  to  his  "  Precieuses  Ridicules,"  was  emphatic 
in  declaring  his  own  willingness  to  abide  by  the  test 
of  the  theater  alone  and  to  refrain  from  any  appeal 
to  the  test  of  the  library.  Again  in  another  preface, 
that  to  his  "Amour  Medecin,"  Moliere  asserted  that 
everybody  knows  "comedies  are  written  only  to  be 
acted." 

ii 

When  we  take  up  the  study  of  any  art,  we  find  that 
there  are  two  ways  of  approach.  We  may  trace  the 
growth  of  the  art,  or  we  may  inquire  into  its  processes. 
In  the  one  case  we  consider  its  history,  and  in  the  other 
we  examine  its  practice.  Either  of  these  methods  is 
certain  to  lead  us  into  pleasant  paths  of  inquiry. 

If  we  determine  to  investigate  the  slow  development 
of  the  drama  through  the  ages,  we  shall  find  ourselves 
in  time  better  fitted  to  answer  questions  which  are 
often  very  puzzling  to  those  who  do  not  recognize  the 
necessity  of  going  back  into  the  past  if  they  wish  to 
understand  the  present.  Why  did  the  Greeks  put  a 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  5 

chorus  into  their  tragedies  ?  In  Shakspere's  plays,  why 
do  the  scenes  change  so  frequently  ?  These  are  queries 
which  many  a  commentator  has  striven  vainly  to  an- 
swer, —  simply  for  lack  of  historical  knowledge.  Re- 
search into  the  origin  of  the  Attic  theater  reveals  to  us 
that  the  Greeks  did  not  put  a  chorus  into  their  tragedies 
and  that  on  the  contrary  they  put  a  tragedy  into  their 
chorus,  —  since  it  was  out  of  the  chorus  that  their 
drama  was  evolved.  Inquiry  into  the  growth  of  the 
Elizabethan  theater  shows  us  that  the  scenes  in  Shak- 
spere's plays  do  not  change  frequently,  —  or  at  least 
that  the  scenery  does  not,  since  in  Shakspere's  stage 
there  was  apparently  no  scenery  to  change. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  shall  not  err  if  we  decide  to 
devote  ourselves  not  so  much  to  the  development  of 
the  drama  as  to  its  technic.  The  basis  of  a  genuine  ap- 
preciation of  any  art  is  an  understanding  of  its  prin- 
ciples. Any  attempt  to  discuss  architecture  as  separate 
from  construction  is  certain  to  be  sterile,  for  the  beauty 
of  architecture  is  often  in  the  exquisite  adaptation  of 
the  means  to  the  end,  —  a  beauty  not  to  be  appre- 
ciated by  those  who  are  indifferent  toward  the  technic 
of  the  art  of  building.  So  also  some  acquaintance  with 
the  various  methods  of  putting  pigments  on  canvas 
is  a  condition  precedent  to  any  firm  grasp  of  the  prin- 
ciples of  pictorial  art.  And  the  technic  of  the  drama 
is  less  simple  than  either  of  these,  since  the  architect 
builds  in  stone  and  steel,  and  the  painter  draws  with 
colors,  whereas  the  work  of  the  dramatist  must  be  de- 
vised  for  interpretation  by  the  actor.  The  dramatic< 
art  is  really  twofold,  since  it  is  the  result  of  a  neces- 
sary union  of  the  efforts  of  the  playwright  and  of  the 
player.  Neither  of  them  is  able  to  accomplish  his  pur- 


6  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

pose  without  the  aid  of  the  other.  To  achieve  a  dra- 
matic masterpiece,  the  dramaturgic  skill  of  the  author 
must  utilize  to  the  utmost  the  histrionic  skill  of  the 
actor. 

As  we  seize  the  importance  of  these  lines  of  ap- 
proach, the  historical  and  the  practical,  we  see  that  a 
sound  knowledge  of  the  drama  is  not  possible  unless 
we  seek  to  attain  both  a  perspective  of  its  develop- 
ment and  an  insight  into  its  technic.  Just  as  the  study 
of  music  is  most  stimulating  when  it  includes  an  in- 
quiry into  the  value  of  each  of  the  several  instruments, 
and  also  into  their  gradual  combination  into  the  most 
marvelous  instrument  of  them  all,  the  modern  orches- 
tra, so  the  study  of  the  drama  is  most  likely  to  be  profit- 
able when  it  leads  us  to  consider  the  successive  modi- 
fications in  the  shape  and  size  of  the  theaters  wherein 
plays  were  acted;  the  varying  circumstances  of  per- 
formance to  which  the  playwrights  had  to  conform ;  the 
conventions  of  the  art,  some  of  them  shifting  from 
century  to  century  or  from  country  to  country,  and 
some  of  them  immutable  in  the  very  nature  of  the 
drama.  Especially  stimulating  is  it  for  us  to  recognize 
the  real  unity  of  history,  the  continuity  of  the  art  of  the 
drama,  which  enables  us  so  often  to  explain  the  past 
by  the  present  and  the  present  by  the  past. 

If  we  combine  the  study  of  technic  with  an  inquiry 
into  the  history  of  the  dramatic  art,  we  shall  find  our- 
selves in  a  condition  to  make  many  suggestive  com- 
parisons. We  shall  be  in  a  position  to  see,  for  instance, 
that  the  comedies  of  Menander  were  probably  in  their 
outward  form  very  like  the  comedies  of  Moliere,  and 
that  the  former  varied  from  the  latter  in  content  partly 
because  of  the  difference  between  the  two  dramatists 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  7 

themselves,  and  partly  because  of  the  unlikeness  of 
the  social  conditions  in  which  they  were  each  of  them 
placed.  We  shall  find  pleasure  in  contrasting  the 
comedy-of-manners  as  it  was  composed  at  the  end  of 
the  eighteenth  century  in  France  by  Beaumarchais 
and  in  England  by  Sheridan,  arch-wits  both  of  them 
and  masters  of  inventive  ingenuity. 

We  can  also  make  the  striking  comparison  between 
two  dramatists  of  genius  separated  by  a  gulf  of  twenty 
centuries,  Sophocles  and  Ibsen,  discovering  in  the 
"(Edipus  the  King"  of  the  one  the  same  massive  sim- 
plicity that  strikes  us  in  the  "  Ghosts"  of  the  other,  the 
Greek  showing  how  fate  is  inevitable  and  the  Scan- 
dinavian 'seeking  to  prove  that  heredity  is  inexorable. 
Sophocles,  it  is  true,  "saw  life  steadily  and  saw  it 
whole,"  while  Ibsen  seems  to  some  of  us  to  have  rather 
a  morbid  liking  for  the  abnormal ;  but  none  the  less  is 
there  a  startling  similarity  in  their  constructive  ability 
and  in  their  surpassing  technical  mastery.  We  can  in- 
struct ourselves  by  tracing  the  potent  influence  exerted 
now  and  again  by  the  drama  of  one  nation  upon  that  of 
another,  inquiring  how  Spanish  pieces  affected  Cor- 
neille  in  his  tragedies,  how  Italian  plays  supplied  an 
early  model  to  Holier e  for  his  comedies,  how  French 
comedy  was  the  exciting  cause  of  English  comedy 
under  the  Restoration,  how  the  English  drama  served 
to  stimulate  Lessing  in  his  reform  of  the  German  drama, 
how  the  social  plays  of  Ibsen  have  powerfully  modified 
the  aims  and  ideals  of  latter-day  dramatists  in  France 
and  in  Spain,  in  Germany  and  in  England.  And  in 
preparing  ourselves  to  make  these  international  com- 
parisons we  can  scarcely  fail  to  gain  a  more  intimate 
knowledge  of  the  dramatic  art. 


8  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

in 

But  we  need  always  to  bear  in  mind  that  Sheridan 
and  Beaumarchais,  Shakspere  and  Moliere,  Sophocles 
and  Ibsen,  however  much  they  may  differ  from  one 
another,  are  alike  in  this  at  least,  —  that  they  all  repre- 
sent an  advanced  development  of  the  drama  as  a  de- 
partment of  literature  and  that  they  were  preceded 
and  made  possible  by  countless  unknown  experimen- 
ters. The  masterpieces  of  these  accomplished  crafts- 
men are  the  final  achievements  of  a  long  effort  sustained 
through  the  dim  centuries.  They  are  the  culmination 
of  an  artistic  evolution,  the  beginnings  of  which  must 
be  looked  for  far  back  in  the  history  of  mankind.  They 
are  the  final  expression  in  cultivated  and  self-conscious 
communities  of  the  primary  play-impulse  of  primitive 
man.  The  literary  drama,  the  play  in  which  the  finer 
attributes  of  structure  and  style  are  added  to  essential 
theatrical  effectiveness,  is  the  direct  outgrowth  of  a 
wholly  unliterary  drama,  which  emerges  into  view 
very  early  in  the  annals  of  civilization.  At  first,  when 
man  still  lingers  in  the  lower  levels  of  savagery  and 
barbarism,  the  dramatic  instinct  expresses  itself  boldly 
enough,  but  crudely  and  coarsely.  It  is  only  after  long 
centuries  of  striving  that  a  more  shapely  drama  at  last 
emerges  in  view,  even  if  far  back  in  man's  progress 
upward  we  are  able  to  discover  that  desire  to  personate 
and  to  get  out  of  himself,  which  is  the  foundation  of 
the  art  of  the  theater.  Very  early  also  can  we  perceive 
the  allied  pleasure  of  being  a  passive  spectator  of  this 
active  personation. 

Until  recently,  it  was  the  general  belief  that  the  drama 
arrived  comparatively  late  in  the  history  of  any  litera- 
ture. This  belief  is  voiced  eloquently  in  Victor  Hugo's 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  9 

preface  to  "Cromwell,"  in  which  he  asserts  that  the 
chronological  sequence  is  first  of  all  the  lyric,  then  the 
epic,  and  finally  the  drama.  There  is  a  sense  in  which 
this  is  true ;  that  is  to  say,  the  literary  drama,  the  play 
which  is  also  poetic  or  philosophic,  comes  into  being 
only  after  the  lyric  and  the  epic  have  given  flexibility 
and  elevation  to  the  language  and  after  they  have  also 
invented  the  stories  which  the  literary  dramatist  can  re- 
handle.  But  the  researches  of  the  anthropologists  have 
made  it  indisputable  that  there  is  a  dramatic  element 
in  the  very  earliest  lyrics  themselves,  and  that  a  rude 
drama  is  perhaps  earlier  even  than  these  earliest  lyrics. 
Letourneau  insists  that  the  drama  in  its  rudimentary 
form 

"  goes  back  to  the  very  origin  of  literary  esthetics,  for  choral 
and  mimic  dances  constitute  nearly  all  the  literature  of  primi- 
tive peoples,  and  a  rudiment  of  scenic  art  has  been  found, 
even  in  Tasmania,  among  an  extremely  inferior  race.  In 
reality,  scenic  poetry  preceded  all  other  kinds,  and  most  fre- 
quently constituted  their  mold.  By  the  simultaneous  employ- 
ment of  mimicry,  song,  speech,  and  instrumental  music,  the 
opera-ballet  of  the  early  ages  was  the  form  of  esthetics  most 
fitted  strongly  to  impress  spectators  and  actors,  and  at  the 
same  time  to  satisfy  a  very  lively  psychical  want,  that  of  pro- 
jecting mental  images  outward,  of  reproducing  with  all  the 
relief  of  reality  what  exists  in  the  brain  only  in  the  state  of 
recollection  or  desire.  The  civilized  theater  is  only  the  natural 
development  of  this  opera-ballet,  and  it  preserves  an  equal 
attraction  and  an  equal  power,  even  after  losing  the  lyrical 
form,  which  dated  from  its  origin." 

And  Hirn  takes  the  same  point  of  view. 

"A  literary  drama,  which  fulfils  all  the  claims  of  a  work 
of  art,"  so  he  declares,  "  is  possible  only  on  a  highly  advanced 
level  of  culture,  and  it  has  consequently  by  most  authors  on 
esthetics  been  considered  as  the  latest  of  all  art-forms.  When 


10  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

dealing,  however,  with  the  productions  of  primitive  tribes, 
we  have  to  adopt  a  lower  esthetic  standard.  Although  we 
do  not  meet  with  any  tragedies,  nor  even  with  any  real  come- 
dies, at  this  stage  of  evolution,  we  can  at  least  point  to  the 
fact  that  simple  farces,  pantomimes  and  pantomimic  dances 
are  to  be  found  among  tribes  who  have  so  far  been  unable 
to  create  any  kind  of  epic,  and  whose  lyrical  poetry  is  re- 
stricted to  a  few  rhythmical  phrases  with  no  intrinsic  mean- 
ing. And  if  we  use  the  word  in  its  widest  sense,  so  as  to  in- 
clude every  representation  by  action,  drama  can  be  spoken 
cf  as  the  very  earliest  of  all  the  imitative  arts.  It  was  certainly 
in  use  long  before  the  invention  of  writing,  either  by  pictures 
or  letters;  perhaps  it  is  even  older  than  language  itself.  As 
an  outward  sign  of  thought,  action  is  more  immediate  than 
words." 

Grosse  is  quite  as  emphatic. 

"The  drama  is  regarded  by  most  historians  of  literature 
and  esthetics  as  the  latest  form  of  poetry;  yet  we  can  say, 
with  a  certain  degree  of  right,  that  it  is  the  earliest.  The 
peculiar  feature  of  the  drama  is  the  representation  of  an 
event  simultaneously  by  speech  and  mimicry.  In  this  sense 
nearly  every  primitive  tale  is  a  drama,  for  the  teller  is  not 
simply  relating  history,  but  he  enlivens  his  words  with  ap- 
propriate intonations  and  gestures.  .  .  .  Children  and  prim- 
itive peoples  are  unable  to  make  any  narration  without  ac- 
companying it  with  the  appropriate  demeanor  and  play  of 
gesture.  Pure  relation  requires  a  command  of  language  and 
of  one's  own  body  which  is  rarely  found  among  civilized 
men  and  hardly  ever  among  savages.  Pure  epic  is  therefore 
probably  the  latest  among  the  three  chief  kinds  of  poetry.'* 

Grosse  further  maintains  that  "common  usage 
means  by  a  drama,  not  the  relation  of  an  event  en- 
livened by  mimicry,  but  its  direct  mimic  and  verbal 
representation  by  several  persons  " ;  and  he  asserts  that 
"we  can  prove  the  existence  of  the  drama  even  in 
this  narrow  sense  in  the  lowest  stages  of  culture."  He 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  11 

then  points  out  that  these  primitive  plays  are  partly 
mimetic,  merely  imitative  representations  of  hunting 
or  fighting,  but  that  they  are  ever  tending  to  rise  to 
the  depiction  of  "an  action  in  constant  development." 
He  admits  that  "words  play  so  subordinate  a  part  in 
the  dramatic  performances  of  hunting  peoples  that  they 
rather  resemble  our  pantomimes  than  our  dramas," 
—  but  a  pantomime  may  be  just  as  truly  dramatic  as 
a  play  in  which  there  is  spoken  dialogue. 

IV 

In  the  quotations  from  Professor  Grosse,  there  is 
one  specially  significant  passage,  —  that  in  which  he 
classes  together  "children  and  primitive  peoples."  If 
we  wish  to  understand  the  feelings  and  the  actions  of 
primitive  peoples,  we  can  get  great  help  from  a  study 
of  the  ways  of  children.  It  seems  now  to  be  generally 
admitted  that  in  our  infancy  and  childhood  we  live  over 
again,  more  or  less  completely,  the  slow  evolution  of 
humanity  from  savagery  to  civilization.  We  find  in 
children  the  same  tendency  to  mimicry,  the  same  de- 
sire to  personate  which  we  discover  in  primitive  peo- 
ples. Professor  William  James,  after  noting  that  "a 
successful  piece  of  mimicry  gives  to  both  bystanders 
and  mimic  a  peculiar  kind  of  esthetic  pleasure,"  and 
that  "the  dramatic  impulse,  the  tendency  to  pretend 
one  is  some  one  else,  contains  this  pleasure  of  mimicry 
as  one  of  its  elements,"  then  remarks  that  "  in  young 
children  this  instinct  often  knows  no  bounds."  He 
cites  one  of  his  own  children  who,  at  the  age  of  three, 
delighted  in  playing  that  he  was  "  a  hyena  or  a  horse- 
car,  or  whatever  the  feigned  object  might  be."  A  hyena 
or  a  horse-car !  —  that  is  to  say,  it  did  not  matter  to  the 


12  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

child  whether  the  object  he  impersonated  was  animate 
or  inanimate.  This  childish  attitude  is  excellently  il- 
lustrated in  the  familiar  anecdote  of  the  three  little 
boys  who  explained  that  they  were  "  playing  automo- 
bile." The  eldest  was  the  chauffeur,  the  next  was  the 
machine  itself,  —  while  Baby  ran  in  the  rear,  repre- 
senting the  lingering  odor  of  the  gasoline. 

A  more  elaborate  illustration  of  this  youthful  fond- 
ness for  assuming  another  personality  can  be  found 
in  the  chapter  of  the  "Adventures  of  Tom  Sawyer," 
wherein  we  see  Tom  about  to  begin  the  distasteful  task 
of  whitewashing  his  aunt's  fence.  Just  then  his  friend 
Ben  Rogers  hove  in  sight  eating  an  apple  and 

"  giving  a  long,  melodious  whoop,  at  intervals,  followed  by 
a  deep-toned  ding-dong-dong,  ding-dong-dong,  for  he  was 
personating  a  steamboat.  As  he  drew  near,  he  slackened 
speed,  took  the  middle  of  the  street,  leaned  far  over  to  star- 
board and  rounded  to  ponderously  and  with  laborious  pomp 
and  circumstance  —  for  he  was  personating  the  Big  Mis- 
souri, and  considered  himself  to  be  drawing  nine  feet  of  wa- 
ter. He  was  boat  and  captain  and  engine-bells  combined, 
so  he  had  to  imagine  himself  standing  on  his  own  hurricane- 
deck  giving  the  orders  and  executing  them: 

"  *  Stop  her,  sir !  Ting-a-ling-ling ! '  The  headway  ran  al- 
most out  and  he  drew  up  slowly  toward  the  sidewalk. 

"'  Ship  up  to  back !  Ting-a-ling-ling!'  His  hands  straight- 
ened and  stiffened  down  to  his  sides. 

"'Set  her  back  on  the  stabboard!  Ting-a-ling-ling! 
Chow!  ch-chow-wow!  Chow!'  His  right  hand,  meantime, 
describing  stately  circles,  —  for  it  was  representing  a  forty- 
foot  wheel. 

"  *  Let  her  go  back  to  thelabboard !  Ting-a-ling-ling !  Chow- 
ch-chow-chow ! '  The  left  hand  began  to  describe  circles. 

"  *  Stop  the  stabboard !  Ting-a-ling-ling !  Stop  the  labboard ! 
Come  ahead  on  the  stabboard !  Stop  her !  Let  your  outside 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  13 

turn  over  slow!  Ting-a-ling-ling !  Chow-ow-ow!  Get  out 
that  head-line !  Lively  now !  Come  out  with  your  spring- 
line  —  what  're  you  about  there !  Take  a  turn  round  that 
stump  with  the  bight  of  it !  Stand  by  that  stage,  now  —  let 
her  go!  Done  with  the  engines,  sir !  Ting-a-ling-ling!  Sh't! 
s'h't!  sh't!'  (trying  the  gage-cocks)." 

A  friendly  correspondent  in  Arizona  once  sent  me 
an  account  of  a  play  his  two  children  had  performed. 
They  were  found  in  the  ruins  of  an  old  house ;  and  in 
a  sad  voice  the  boy  explained  that  they  were  "  offering 
up  little  Isaac."  A  broken  toy  was  Isaac.  A  brick  un- 
der a  bush  was  the  ram.  They  told  how  they  had  built 
a  fire  under  Isaac,  admitting  at  once  that  the  fire  was 
only  make-believe.  And  when  they  were  asked,  "  Who 
was  Abraham?"  the  little  girl  promptly  answered, 
"We  was."  The  girl  was  four  years  old  and  the  boy 
was  only  three.  It  is  easy  to  seize  the  likeness  between 
the  scene  thus  acted  by  these  children  and  the  rudi- 
mentary dramas  which  are  performed  by  savages. 
Underlying  both  is  the  desire  to  personate,  the  impulse 
to  take  part  in  an  action,  and  the  abundant  willing- 
ness to  make  believe. 


The  real  difference  between  the  little  play  of  these 
children  and  the  rudimentary  drama  of  savages  lies  in 
the  fact  that  the  children  are  acting  as  individuals, 
whereas  the  savages  are  playing  in  large  groups.  In  the 
rudimentary  drama  of  savages  there  is  likely  to  be  a 
communal  element.  At  certain  seasons  of  the  year, 
especially  at  springtime  and  at  harvest,  at  midsummer 
and  at  midwinter,  the  whole  community  takes  part  in 
the  performance,  —  or  if  not  the  whole  community,  a 


14  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

representative  group  which  expresses  the  sentiment  of 
all.  In  the  primitive  stages  of  poetry,  so  Professor 
Gummere  tells  us,  there  is  seen 

"a  throng  of  people  without  skill  to  read  or  write,  without 
ability  to  project  themselves  into  the  future,  or  to  compare 
themselves  with  the  past,  or  even  to  range  their  experience 
with  the  experience  of  other  communities,  gathered  in  festal 
mood,  and  by  loud  song,  perfect  rhythm  and  energetic  dance, 
expressing  their  feelings  over  an  event  of  quite  local  origin, 
present  appeal  and  common  interest.  Here,  in  point  of  evo- 
lution, is  the  human  basis  of  poetry,  the  foundation  courses 
of  the  pyramid ;  in  point  of  poetic  process  here  is  the  social 
as  opposed  to  the  individifal  element." 

Sometimes  the  individual  element  is  evolved  after 
a  while  out  of  the  social  element,  or  is  superadded  to 
it ;  and  then  we  may  have  a  rapid  development  of  the 
drama.  This  is  the  way  that  the  Greeks  slowly  achieved 
their  glorious  drama.  Out  of  the  humblest  origins,  it 
was  elevated  to  a  lofty  pinnacle.  As  Sir  Richard  Jebb 
has  told  us,  the  Greek  drama 

**  sprang  from  the  species  of  lyric  poem  called  the  dithyramb 
.  .  .  originally  a  convivial  song  definitely  associated  with 
the  god  Dionysus  ...  a  song  to  the  wine-god  had  presum- 
ably a  wild,  impassioned  character,  and  was  accompanied 
with  gesticulation.  .  .  .  When  Arion  formed  his  dithyram- 
bic  chorus  of  satyrs,  he  was  assigning  the  song  of  Dionysus 
to  specially  appropriate  performers  .  .  .  and  he  was  also 
making  the  performance  something  more  lively,  more  char- 
acteristic than  an  ordinary  choral  song.  Thespis,  in  pro- 
ducing a  dithyrambic  chorus,  came  forward  as  a  reciter  of 
verses,  addressing  his  chorus  of  satyrs  and  doubtless  per- 
sonating a  satyr  himself.  .  .  .  But  even  then  the  entertain- 
ment fell  short  of  being  dramatic.  The  reciter  of  verses  who 
addressed  the  dithyrambic  chorus  could  indeed  relate  action. 
But  action  could  not  yet  be  represented  as  taking  place  be- 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  15 

fore  the  eyes  of  the  spectators.  .  .  .  Instead  of  the  single  re- 
citer, ^Eschylus  introduced  two  persons,  both,  like  the  single 
reciter,  detached  from  the  chorus.  These  two  persons  could 
hold  a  dialogue  and  could  represent  action.  By  this  change 
JSschylus  altered  the  whole  character  of  the  lyric  tragedy, 
and  created  a  drama.  The  dialogue  between  the  actors  now 
became  the  dominant  feature  of  the  entertainment;  the  part 
of  the  lyric  chorus,  though  still  very  important,  had  now 
only  a  diminished  importance." 

Sophocles  employed  a  third  actor,  and  each  of  these 
three  performers  could  appear  in  several  characters. 
It  was  possible  then  to  show  a  story  in  action  and  to 
present  before  the  spectators  that  conflict  of  human 
wills  which  has  ever  been  the  mainspring  of  the  drama. 

These  are  the  successive  stages  of  the  evolution  of 
the  noble  Greek  drama  out  of  a  rude  communal  song. 
And  not  unlike  are  the  successive  stages  of  the  evolu- 
tion of  the  drama  of  the  several  modern  languages  out 
of  very  simple  mimetic  interpolations  into  the  ritual 
of  the  medieval  church  as  prescribed  for  Christmas 
and  Easter.  At  Christmas,  a  single  chorister  was  set 
apart  to  announce  the  glad  tidings,  and  a  group  of 
choristers  was  assigned  to  represent  the  shepherds 
who  were  guided  by  a  star  to  the  manger.  At  Easter, 
three  priests  spoke  the  words  set  down  for  the  three 
Marys,  at  the  tomb,  and  another  appeared  "in  the 
likeness  of  a  gardener."  In  time,  the  Christmas  cycle 
of  dialogues  and  hymns  and  narrative  was  combined 
with  the  Easter  cycle,  and  the  passion-play  came  into 
being.  Its  several  episodes  had  each  of  them  been  de- 
vised to  illustrate  the  service  of  a  special  day  of  the 
church  year ;  and  they  had  each  of  them  been  first 
performed  in  Latin  in  the  church  by  ecclesiastics  or 
choristers.  Then,  after  the  mystery  was  full  grown, 


16  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

it  was  felt  to  be  too  great  a  burden ;  and  it  was  thrust 
out  of  the  church,  confided  to  laymen  and  translated 
into  the  several  vernaculars.  The  laymen  who  took  it 
over  meant  to  continue  all  the  traditions  of  the  per- 
formance within  the  church,  yet  sooner  or  later  they 
were  led  to  apply  the  same  methods  to  secular  stories. 
Thus  it  was  that  in  each  of  the  modern  languages  the 
drama  had  a  common  origin  in  a  religious  exercise, 
and  that  in  each  of  them  it  developed  in  accord  with 
racial  characteristics,  so  that  in  time  there  came  to  be 
a  wide  differentiation  between  the  plays  performed  in 
the  several  tongues,  although  they  were  all  outflower- 
ings  from  the  same  Latin  stock. 

As  we  study  these  evolutions  of  dramatic  form,  we 
see  that  what  was  at  first  more  or  less  communal  be- 
comes more  or  less  individual,  and  what  was  at  first 
more  or  less  spontaneous  becomes  more  or  less  tradi- 
tional. In  time,  custom  crystallizes ;  and  then  out  of  the 
established  custom  there  is  a  pew  departure,  another 
step  forward.  There  comes  into  existence  an  accepted 
way  of  telling  a  story  in  action,  a  formula  satisfactory 
to  actors  and  spectators  alike;  and  this  formula  tends 
constantly  to  become  more  effective  theatrically  as  the 
casual  performers  more  and  more  take  on  the  aspect 
of  professionals,  conscious  that  they  are  exercising  an 
art.  The  plays  they  present  may  still  be  rough  and  crude ; 
their  art  may  be  rather  elementary  as  yet;  but  it  is 
alive  and  it  contains  the  possibility  of  progress.  At 
this  moment,  the  drama  is  still  unliterary ;  there  is  little 
skill  of  structure,  little  polish  of  style,  little  insight  into 
human  nature.  But  the  dramatic  formula  is  slowly  get- 
ting into  shape,  and  making  itself  ready  for  the  hand 
of  the  literary  artist  whenever  he  shall  happen  along. 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  17 

As  the  earlier  unliterary  efforts  have  not  been  pre- 
served, no  one  can  now  specify  with  any  certainty  the 
exact  moment  when  the  Greek  drama  began  to  lift  it- 
self into  literature.  Only  literature  is  permanent;  and 
the  unliterary  drama  is  never  cherished  and  guarded. 
A  few  of  the  plays  of  ^Eschylus  have  been  handed  down 
to  us,  probably  the  best  of  them,  since  only  the  best 
would  be  multiplied  in  many  manuscripts ;  and  we  can 
see  that  they  are  literature  beyond  all  question.  But 
the  dialogues  of  Thespis  with  his  chorus  have  all  per- 
ished ;  and  we  shall  never  know  whether  or  not  they 
really  attained  to  literature.  In  the  Middle  Ages,  it  was 
not  till  long  after  Latin  had  given  place  to  the  several 
vernaculars  that  we  begin  to  find  gleams  of  literary 
merit;  and  the  most  of  the  mysteries  and  moralities, 
which  have  been  abundantly  preserved,  are  deadly  dull, 
whether  they  are  in  French  or  English,  in  Italian  or 
in  German.  The  mystery  had  been  succeeded  in  Eng- 
land by  the  chronicle-play,  and  this  had  long  pleased 
the  public  before  any  man  of  indisputable  literary  gift 
undertook  to  compose  it.  And  in  France,  it  was  not 
until  Corneille  succeeded  Hardy  that  the  drama  rose 
to  the  lofty  level  of  poetry. 

Corneille  did  at  first  very  much  what  Hardy  had 
done,  but  he  did  it  better,  being  more  richly  endowed 
with  the  native  playmaking  instinct.  So  Marlowe  did 
very  much  what  his  predecessors  had  done,  using  the 
same  rough  framework,  but  putting  into  the  mouths 
of  his  characters  the  mighty  lines  of  which  he  alone 
was  then  capable.  At  any  period  of  the  development 
of  the  drama,  in  the  days  of  Corneille  as  in  the  days  of 
Marlowe,  in  our  own  time  as  well,  the  same  framework, 
the  same  external  form,  the  same  method  of  handling 


18  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  material,  characterize  both  the  literary  play  and 
the  unliterary  play.  They  are  always  very  much  alike 
in  outward  appearance;  it  is  in  the  inner  soul  that 
they  differ.  Kyd's  "Spanish  Tragedy"  belongs  to  the 
strange  type  of  piece  now  known  as  the  tragedy-of- 
blood,  and  so  does  Shakspere's  "Hamlet."  Victor 
Hugo's  "Ruy  Bias"  is  essentially  a  melodrama  distin- 
guishable only  by  its  lyrical  affluence  from  the  contem- 
porary pieces  of  Ducange  and  Pixerecourt,  on  which 
it  was  modeled.  To-day,  the  social  dramas  of  Ibsen 
and  Hervieu,  the  comedies  of  Barrie  and  Shaw,  are 
composed  in  accord  with  the  same  formula  which  serves 
for  the  hack  playwrights  who  write  uninspired  pieces 
to  order.  The  difference  between  the  play  which  is  lit- 
erature and  the  play  which  is  not  literature,  which  is  in 
fact  only  a  form  of  journalism,  sufficient  unto  the  day 
and  no  more,  —  this  difference  is  not  external  but  in- 
ternal. It  is  to  be  felt  far  more  easily  than  it  is  to  be 
defined.  And  the  play  which  we  gladly  hail  as  literature 
succeeds  in  the  theater,  pleases  its  many  audiences, 
delights  a  succession  of  spectators,  year  after  year, 
and  century  after  century,  because  of  its  possession 
of  qualities  not  in  themselves  literary,  because  it  has 
the  intangible  but  essential  something  which  makes 
a  story  interesting  to  the  multitude  when  it  is  set  forth 
in  action  on  the  stage. 

The  unliterary  plays  of  any  period  are  likely  to  be 
neglected  by  the  historian  of  dramatic  literature  be- 
cause they  are  now  more  or  less  unreadable,  although 
in  their  own  day  they  were  preeminently  actable.  These 
unliterary  plays  are  likely  also  to  be  inaccessible,  even 
if  they  have  been  preserved,  which  is  rarely  the  case. 
Of  the  thousands  of  plays  produced  in  Greece,  we  have 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  19 

only  a  few  selected  masterpieces  of  JEschylus,  Sopho- 
cles, and  Euripides.  Of  the  thousands  of  plays  pro- 
duced in  England  while  Shakspere  was  yet  alive,  only 
a  few  hundreds  have  come  down  to  us  to-day.  In  so 
far  as  the  writings  of  the  less  literary  of  the  Elizabethan 
playwrights  have  been  transmitted  to  us,  they  are  in- 
valuable for  the  light  they  cast  on  the  theatrical  con- 
ditions of  the  time  and  for  the  insight  they  give  us  into 
the  circumstances  of  actual  performance,  the  circum- 
stances which  governed  Shakspere  as  much  as  they 
governed  Heywood;  but  in  themselves  these  pieces 
are  not  really  important. 

Charles  Lamb  ventured  to  call  Heywood  a  "prose 
Shakspere,"  but  it  is  only  now  and  again  in  a  few  pas- 
sages of  "A  Woman  Killed  with  Kindness,"  and  occa- 
sionally in  another  play  or  two,  that  Heywood  rises  to 
the  level  of  literature.  Heywood  was  the  most  adroit 
and  prolific  playwright  of  his  time;  but  for  the  most 
part  his  work  is  journeyman  and  journalistic ;  it  was 
actable  then,  but  it  is  well-nigh  unreadable  now.  Yet 
Heywood's  plays  were  written  for  the  same  audiences 
as  Shakspere's,  and  they  conform  to  the  same  theatri- 
cal conditions.  And  in  the  nineteenth  century  in  France, 
Scribe  was  the  master  of  the  theater,  a  wizard  of  dra- 
maturgy, a  technician  of  marvelous  dexterity.  But  he 
is  a  man  of  the  theater  only ;  he  is  not  a  man  of  let- 
ters, and  very  few  of  his  countless  pieces  have  any  pre- 
tension to  literature.  Yet  when  Dumas  fits  and  Augier 
followed  in  Scribe's  footsteps  and  borrowed  Scribe's 
formula,  enlarging  it  to  contain  their  vision  of  life, 
they  were  able  to  lift  their  plays  into  literature.  They 
were  men  of  the  theater  who  were  also  men  of  letters, 
and  their  plays  are  readable  as  well  as  actable. 


20  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

VI 

When  we  undertake  to  consider  whether  a  play  de- 
serves to  be  considered  as  literature  or  not,  we  need 
to  clear  our  minds  of  a  current  misconception  as  to  the 
constituents  of  literary  merit,  so-called.  True  literary 
merit  is  not  a  matter  of  fine  writing,  of  pretty  phrases, 
of  style  only.  The  real  literary  merit  of  a  play  does  not 
reside  so  much  in  its  mere  wording  as  in  its  solid  struc- 
ture, in  the  logic  of  the  plot,  in  the  sincerity  of  its  char- 
acter-drawing. Fine  writing  has  never  yet  made  a 
good  play ;  and  the  good  play  is  a  good  play  independ- 
ently of  all  its  phrases,  however  glowing  and  gorgeous 
these  may  be.  This  Aristotle  saw  quite  as  clearly  as 
Lessing  and  Sarcey;  and  he  was  emphatic  in  insisting 
on  the  primary  importance  of  plot,  of  the  story  which 
is  interesting  in  itself,  and  which  is  interestingly  articu- 
lated. We  may  be  sure  that  the  great  Greek  critic 
would  have  approved  of  the  shrewd  remark  of  a  mod- 
ern Frenchman,  to  the  effect  that  the  skeleton  of  a 
good  play  is  always  a  pantomime.  That  is  to  say,  the 
story  must  be  so  strong  and  so  clear  that  it  can  stand 
by  itself,  whether  well  or  ill  written,  whether  the  au- 
dience can  or  cannot  appreciate  its  added  poetry  or 
philosophy.  We  may  see  many  things  in  "Hamlet," 
we  may  acclaim  it  as  the  absolute  masterpiece  of  the 
poetic  drama ;  but  it  would  move  the  majority  of  the 
spectators  if  it  should  be  acted  before  the  inmates  of 
a  deaf-and-dumb  asylum,  unable  to  seize  the  beauties 
which  delight  us,  but  quite  capable  of  being  carried 
away  by  the  sheer  power  of  the  splendidly  theatric 
plot. 

This  is  what  has  always  been  felt  by  the  literary  as 
well  as  by  the  unliterary  playwrights.  Scribe  used  to 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  21 

say  that  "when  my  subject  is  good,  when  my  scenario 
is  very  clear,  very  complete,  I  might  have  the  play  writ- 
ten by  my  servant ;  he  would  be  sustained  by  the  situa- 
tion;—  and  the  play  would  succeed."  From  Scribe, 
who  was  only  an  ingenious  mechanician  of  the  drama, 
this  may  not  surprise  us ;  but  his  saying  would  not  be 
greatly  objected  to  by  any  true  dramatist,  poet,  or  prose- 
man,  for  it  is  only  an  overstatement  of  the  truth.  Me- 
nander,  the  master  of  Greek  comedy,  was  once  asked 
about  his  new  play,  so  Plutarch  tells  us,  and  he  an- 
swered :  "  It  is  composed  and  ready ;  I  have  only  the 
verses  to  write."  Racine's  son  reports  an  almost  iden- 
tical remark  of  his  father's  in  answer  to  a  similar  in- 
quiry. And  there  is  no  dispute  possible  as  to  the  ele- 
vated position  attained  by  Racine  and  by  Menander 
when  they  are  judged  by  purely  literary  standards. 

In  other  words,  the  literary  quality  is  something  that 
may  be  added  to  a  drama,  but  which  is  not  essential  to 
its  value  as  a  play  in  the  theater  itself.  And  while  we 
cannot  have  a  great  play  unless  it  is  lifted  into  litera- 
ture by  skill  of  structure,  by  veracity  of  character,  by 
felicity  of  dialogue,  it  does  not  attract  the  public  by  its 
possession  of  these  qualities  alone.  Joseph  Jefferson, 
speaking  out  of  his  long  experience  on  the  stage,  de- 
clared that  "  you  may  have  all  the  good  literature  you 
wish  in  a  play,  —  if  it  does  not  interfere  with  the  play's 
action."  He  added  that  "the  absence  of  fine  writing  in 
a  play  will  not  injure  it  if  the  story  and  construction 
are  right.  Literary  merit  will  enhance  the  chances  of 
success  if  it  be  subservient  to  the  action."  And  so  de- 
claring his  opinion,  Jefferson  was  only  echoing  what 
Aristotle  had  said  two  thousand  years  earlier. 

This  is  a  hard  saying  for  the  merely  literary  critic, 


22  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

whether  it  comes  from  the  mouth  of  the  Greek  philoso- 
pher or  from  that  of  the  American  comedian ;  and  yet 
it  needs  to  be  taken  to  heart  by  all  who  seek  to  pene- 
trate to  a  real  knowledge  of  the  drama.  The  merely 
literary  critic  is  competent  only  to  perceive  the  less  im- 
portant of  the  merely  literary  qualities  of  a  drama.  He 
can  appreciate  the  external  poetry  with  which  the  ac- 
tion of  the  play  may  be  clothed ;  but  this  action  itself  is 
not  easy  for  him  to  estimate  at  its  true  value.  He  studies 
the  play  in  the  library,  where  the  quality  of  style  is 
most  obvious,  and  not  in  the  theater,  where  story  and 
structure  are  more  important.  The  merely  literary 
critic  tends  to  neglect,  and  perhaps  even  to  despise,  the 
purely  theatrical  qualities  which  must  always  sustain  a 
vital  play;  and  he  does  not  care  to  consider  the  con- 
temporary unliterary  pieces  which  would  often  help  him 
to  a  better  understanding  of  these  purely  theatrical 
qualities,  revealed  at  once  where  the  piece  is  acted  on 
the  stage. 

There  is  one  thing  that  every  student  of  the  drama 
should  try  to  train  himself  to  accomplish.  In  reading 
any  play,  ancient  or  modern,  in  English  or  in  a  foreign 
tongue,  he  should  endeavor  always  to  transport  him- 
self from  the  library  into  the  theater  and  to  visualize 
an  actual  performance.  He  should  strive  to  translate 
the  cold  printed  page  of  the  book  into  the  warm  action 
of  living  performers  on  the  stage.  He  should  call  up 
a  mental  image  of  the  scene  where  the  story  is  laid ;  and 
he  should  evoke  moving  pictures  of  the  several  char- 
acters, not  merely  with  his  eye  reading  the  dialogue,  but 
with  his  ear  hearing  it  as  actors  would  speak  it.  He 
should  do  his  best  to  put  himself  in  the  place  of  the 
spectators  for  whose  enjoyment  the  play  was  originally 


THE  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA  23 

composed ;  and  he  should  make  what  Jebb  aptly  termed 
an  "  effort  of  imaginative  sympathy,"  that  he  may  as 
far  as  possible  realize  the  conditions  of  actual  perform- 
ance. Stevenson  recorded  that  his  friend,  Fleeming 
Jenkin,  had  acquired  this  art  of  visualizing  a  drama 
from  the  printed  page,  and  he  asserted  that  this  was 
"  a  knack,  the  fruit  of  much  knowledge  and  some  im- 
agination, comparable  to  that  of  reading  score."  To 
do  this  is  not  easy;  indeed,  to  achieve  it  completely 
is  not  possible;  but  the  effort,  however  feeble  it  may 
be,  is  worth  while.  And  it  will  be  its  own  reward,  for 
only  by  its  aid  can  we  teach  ourselves  and  train  our- 
selves to  disentangle  the  essential  theatrical  effective- 
ness of  the  masterpieces  of  the  great  dramatic  poets. 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   INFLUENCE   OF  THE  ACTOB 

For  ill  can  Poetry  express 

Full  many  a  tone  of  thought  sublime, 
And  Painting,  mute  and  motionless, 

Steals  but  a  glance  of  time. 
But  by  the  mighty  actor  brought 

Illusions  perfect  triumphs  come,  — 
Verse  ceases  to  be  airy  thought, 

And  Sculpture  to  be  dumb. 

THOMAS  CAMPBELL,  To  John  Philip  Kemble. 


IN  the  nineteenth  century,  there  were  British  and  Amer- 
ican poets  of  high  distinction  who  were  attracted  to 
the  dramatic  form,  and  who  sought  to  express  them- 
selves in  it,  but  without  considering  the  conditions  of 
the  stage  of  their  own  time,  which  seemed  to  them  a 
period  of  decadence.  They  disregarded  the  spectator 
in  the  theater  itself  and  sought  to  interest  solely  the 
reader  in  the  library.  They  liked  to  think  of  themselves 
as  dramatists  and  to  claim  praise  for  dramatic  achieve- 
ment, but  without  facing  the  ordeal  by  fire  before  the 
footlights.  Looking  upon  the  drama  as  an  easy  form, 
they  took  no  trouble  to  spy  out  its  secrets  or  to  master 
its  technic.  And  perhaps  deep  down  in  their  hearts, 
there  was  a  vague  contempt  for  the  acted  drama,  be- 
cause it  had  to  appeal  to  the  mere  mob,  to  the  vulgar 
throng.  We  can  listen  to  their  sentiments  as  these 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR    25 

are  voiced  by  the  Poet  in  the  Prologue  on  the  Stage  of 
Goethe's  " Faust"  :- 

"  Speak  not  to  me  of  yonder  motley  masses, 
Whom  but  to  see  puts  out  the  fire  of  Song! 

Hide  from  my  view  the  surging  crowd  that  passes, 
And  in  its  whirlpool  forces  us  along! 

No,  lead  me  where  some  heavenly  silence  glasses 
The  purer  joys  that  round  the  Poet  throng." 

This  attitude  may  not  be  unbecoming  in  the  lyric 
poet,  who  has  but  to  express  his  own  emotions;  but 
it  is  impossible  in  a  true  dramatic  poet,  who  feels  that 
what  he  has  wrought  is  not  complete  until  he  has  seen 
it  bodied  forth  by  actors  on  the  stage  before  the  motley 
masses  and  before  the  surging  crowd.  The  true  drama- 
tic poet  would  never  hesitate  to  adopt  Moliere's  state- 
ment of  his  own  practice :  "  I  accept  easily  enough  the 
decisions  of  the  multitude,  and  I  hold  it  as  difficult  to 
assail  a  work  which  the  public  approves  as  to  defend 
one  which  it  condemns."  But  however  much  the  lyric 
poet  may  detach  himself  from  the  surging  crowd  and 
despise  the  motley  masses,  even  he  must  not  forget 
his  readers  absolutely;  it  is  only  at  his  peril  that  he 
can  neglect  the  duty  of  being  readable.  Taine  declared 
that  Browning  had  been  guilty  of  this  fault  in  "The 
Ring  and  the  Book,"  wherein  the  poet  "  never  thinks 
of  the  reader,  and  lets  his  characters  talk  as  though 
no  one  were  to  read  their  speeches." 

What  may  be  only  a  minor  fault  in  the  lyric  poet 
becomes  a  gross  blunder  in  the  dramatic  poet,  who  can 
never  claim  the  right  of  solitary  self-expression,  which 
the  lyrist  may  assert.  The  drama  has  for  its  basis  an 
appeal  to  the  whole  public,  and  not  to  any  coterie  of 
dilettants.  Since  we  write  poems  to  be  performed, 


26  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

"  our  first  duty  ought  to  be  to  please  the  court  and  the 
people  and  to  attract  a  great  throng  to  their  perform- 
ances " ;  so  said  Corneille,  declaring  frankly  the  doctrine 
of  every  genuine  dramatic  poet.  "  We  must,  if  we  can, 
abide  by  the  rules,  so  as  not  to  displease  the  learned, 
and  to  receive  universal  applause;  but,  above  all  else, 
let  us  win  the  voice  of  the  people."  The  great  drama- 
tists of  every  period  when  the  drama  was  flourishing 
would  have  echoed  this  firm  declaration  of  Cor- 
neille's.  By  their  own  splendid  experience,  they  had 
learnt  how  greatly  the  artist  may  profit  by  a  resolute 
struggle  with  limitations  and  with  obstacles ;  and  they 
could  scarcely  refrain  from  contempt  for  the  timorous 
poets  who  have  shrunk  from  this  profitable  effort.  And 
as  the  result  of  a  choice  of  the  easier  path,  these  craven 
bards  have  failed  to  reach  the  goal  toward  which  they 
fondly  believed  themselves  to  be  aiming.  The  closet- 
dramas  are  all  unactable;  most  of  them  are  unread- 
able; and  many  of  them  are  unspeakable.  Although 
important  poets  have  condescended  to  the  composi- 
tion of  plays  not  intended  to  be  played,  their  impor- 
tance is  not  due  to  their  closet-dramas ;  and  perhaps 
their  fame  would  be  almost  as  high  if  they  had  re- 
frained from  these  poems  in  dialogue. 

The  dramatic  poets  —  Sophocles,  Shakspere,  Mo- 
liere  —  have  always  been  willing  to  take  thought  of 
the  players  by  whom  their  plays  were  to  be  presented, 
and  of  the  playgoers  whom  they  hoped  to  attract  in 
motley  masses.  Consciously,  to  some  extent,  and  un- 
consciously more  often,  they  shaped  the  stories  they 
were  telling  to  the  circumstances  of  the  actual  perform- 
ance customary  on  the  contemporary  stage.  Whether 
they  knew  it  or  not,  their  great  tragedies  and  their 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR    27 

great  comedies,  as  we  have  them  now,  are  what  they 
are,  partly  because  of  the  influence  of  the  several  ac- 
tors for  whom  they  devised  their  chief  characters, 
partly  because  the  theater  to  which  they  were  accus- 
tomed was  of  a  certain  size  and  had  certain  peculiarities 
of  structure,  and  partly  because  the  spectators  they 
wished  to  move  had  certain  prejudices  and  certain 
preconceptions  natural  to  their  race  and  to  their  era. 
This  is  why  it  is  useful  to  consider  the  influence  which 
the  actor,  the  theater,  and  the  audience  can  severally 
exert  upon  the  dramatist,  —  influences  necessarily 
felt  by  every  dramatic  poet,  great  or  small,  in  every 
period  in  the  long  evolution  of  the  drama. 

ii 

Of  these  three  influences,  the  most  immediate  is  that 
of  the  actors,  with  whom  the  playwright  has  ever 
to  work  in  cordial  sympathy,  and  without  whose  as- 
sistance his  play  cannot  be  represented  as  he  has  con- 
ceived it.  The  critic  nowadays  who  looks  upon  the 
drama  as  lying  wholly  within  the  circle  of  literature, 
and  who  fails  to  perceive  its  vital  connection  with  the 
actual  theater,  is  often  moved  to  make  it  a  matter  of 
reproach  to  certain  contemporary  playwrights  that 
they  are  wont  to  write  plays  to  fit  a  special  actor  or  a 
special  actress.  In  thus  finding  fault,  the  critic  reveals 
not  only  his  misunderstanding  of  the  needful  relation 
between  the  dramatist  and  the  performers  who  are  to 
personate  his  characters,  but  also  an  inability  to  ap- 
preciate the  way  in  which  the  mind  of  the  artist  is  often 
set  in  motion  by  accidents  that  may  seem  casual  and 
trifling. 

In  every  art,  there  is  often  a  startling  disproportion 


28  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

between  the  exciting  cause  and  the  ultimate  result. 
We  might  almost  liken  the  artist  to  the  oyster  which 
is  moved  by  a  grain  of  sand  to  produce  a  pearl  of  great 
price.  More  than  one  of  the  most  triumphant  artistic 
feats  of  the  Italian  Renascence  is  what  it  is  because 
the  painter  had  to  make  the  best  of  a  certain  particular 
wall-space  over  an  altar  or  because  the  sculptor  had 
to  get  his  statue  out  of  a  given  block  of  marble  of  un- 
usual shape  and  size.  The  painter  and  the  sculptor 
accepted  the  limitations  of  the  wall-space  and  of  the 
marble-block,  and  found  their  profit  in  so  doing;  they 
made  a  stepping-stone  out  of  that  which  would  have 
been  only  a  stumbling-block  to  the  less  ingenious  and 
the  less  imaginative. 

So  the  artist  in  playmaking  sees  his  opportunity 
and  finds  his  profit  in  the  special  accomplishments 
of  the  actors  of  his  own  time.  Of  course,  the  dramatist 
ought  not  to  subject  himself  to  the  actors,  nor  ought 
he  to  limit  what  he  conceives  to  the  capacity  of  the 
special  performers  he  may  have  in  view.  But  he  must 
always  take  account  of  them  and  keep  them  in  mind, 
because  the  art  of  the  drama  is  a  twofold  art,  and  be- 
cause the  playwright  and  the  players  must  work  in 
unison,  ever  aiding  each  other  because  they  always 
depend  on  each  other.  The  dramatist  is  quite  as  help- 
less without  the  actors  as  the  actors  are  without  the 
dramatist.  Without  them,  the  playwright  has  only  the 
barren  appeal  to  posterity,  which  is  certain  never  to 
reach  its  ears.  Without  him,  the  performers  can  be 
seen  only  in  old  plays,  of  which  the  public  is  sure  to 
tire,  sooner  or  later. 

This  ideal  harmony  of  these  partners  in  art  has  not 
always  been  obtained,  since  both  parties  to  the  alliance 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR         29 

are  likely  to  be  endowed  with  the  occasional  irritability 
and  with  the  swift  susceptibility  of  the  artistic  tempera- 
ment. But  the  best  results  have  been  achieved  by  both 
when  they  have  labored  together  loyally.  It  is  without 
surprise,  therefore,  that  we  find  it  recorded  that  Sopho- 
cles, the  foremost  of  Greek  tragic  dramatists,  the  su- 
preme artist  of  a  most  artistic  race,  was  believed  to 
have  composed  his  chief  characters  for  some  one  par- 
ticular actor,  although  we  do  not  now  know  the  name 
of  this  special  performer,  whose  histrionic  gifts  stimu- 
lated the  dramaturgic  energy  of  the  austere  poet.  In 
more  than  one  of  the  surviving  plays  of  Sophocles, 
we  can  easily  discover  what  would  nowadays  be  called 
a  "  star-part,"  a  single  character  who  has  always  the 
center  of  the  action  and  in  whose  fate  the  interest  of 
the  story  culminates. 

It  is  a  matter  of  inference,  rather  than  of  actual  record, 
that  Shakspere  kept  in  mind  the  histrionic  capacity 
of  the  several  leading  performers  of  the  company  of 
which  he  was  himself  a  member,  and  for  which  all  his 
plays  were  composed.  Apparently,  the  greatest  of  dra- 
matic poets  was  not  himself  an  actor  of  abundant 
native  endowment,  however  keen  might  be  his  insight 
into  the  principles  of  the  histrionic  art.  So  far  as  we 
know,  he  confined  his  efforts  to  parts  for  which  in- 
telligence, dignity,  and  delivery  were  sufficient  equip- 
ment,—  the  Ghost  in  "Hamlet,"  old  Adam  in  "As 
You  Like  It,"  and  the  elder  Knowell  in  "Every  Man 
in  his  Humor."  In  other  words,  the  greatest  of  dra- 
matic poets  was  probably  as  an  actor  of  only  respect- 
able rank ;  and  he  seems  to  have  yielded  the  chief  char- 
acters even  in  his  own  plays  to  the  more  gifted  of  his 
fellow-players.  It  was  not  for  his  own  acting  that  he 


3d  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

wrote  "  Hamlet/ '  but  for  Burbage's;  and  Burbage  cre- 
ated the  most  of  the  star-parts  in  Shakspere's  pieces. 

A  close  scrutiny  of  Shakspere's  text  will  enable  us 
to  make  more  than  one  inference  about  the  actors  with 
whom  he  was  associated  and  for  whom  he  wrote  his 
comedies  and  his  tragedies.  It  has  been  pointed  out 
how  the  gauntness  of  Holof ernes  is  evidence  that  there 
was  a  lean  actor  in  the  company,  —  the  same  performer 
probably  who  was  later  to  play  the  envious  Cassius. 
There  were  no  actresses  in  the  Shaksperian  theaters, 
as  there  had  been  none  in  the  mysteries  and  moralities 
which  had  preceded  the  Elizabethan  drama  and  which 
had  made  it  possible.  All  the  women's  parts  were  per- 
formed by  boy-actors,  difficult  as  this  fact  may  be  to 
reconcile  with  the  variety  and  subtlety  of  the  female 
characters  in  Shakspere's  dramas  and  with  their  essen- 
tial womanliness  and  abundant  femininity.  It  has 
been  said  that  even  if  there  are  few  heroes  in  Shak- 
spere's plays,  there  are  many  heroines ;  and  yet  all  these 
heroines  sprang  into  life  for  the  acting  of  one  or  another 
of  the  smooth-faced  boys  who  were  then  employed  by 
the  associated  actor-managers.  Only  a  little  while  be- 
fore Shakspere  composed  the  gloomy  group  of  come- 
dies, so-called,  of  which  "Measure  for  Measure"  and 
"  All's  Well  that  Ends  Well"  are  the  most  significant, 
he  had  produced  a  swift  succession  of  gay  and  joyous 
romantic-comedies,  "As  You  Like  It"  and  "Twelfth 
Night,"  the  "Merchant  of  Venice"  and  "Much  Ado 
about  Nothing."  Perhaps  we  may  ascribe  the  exist- 
ence of  the  delightful  heroines  of  these  witty  and  pa- 
thetic pieces,  Rosalind  and  Viola,  Portia  and  Beatrice, 
to  Shakspere's  appreciation  of  the  unusual  ability  of 
some  clean-shaven  lad  to  personate  these  charming 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR    31 

maidens,  sparkling  yet  tender,  willing  to  be  wooed  and 
yet  coy. 

In  our  modern  theaters,  when  these  parts  are  en- 
trusted to  actresses,  there  is  an  obvious  lack  of  plausi- 
bility in  the  performance  as  soon  as  the  girls  try  to 
pass  themselves  off  as  boys.  A  spectator  to-day  cannot 
help  wondering  how  it  is  that  Orlando  fails  to  see  that 
the  self-styled  Ganymede  is  a  woman,  and  how  it  is  that 
Portia  was  able  to  fool  the  Duke  into  a  belief  that  she 
was  a  lawyer  of  the  sterner  sex.  In  Shakspere's  time, 
this  difficulty  did  not  exist.  Then  a  boy  impersonating 
a  girl  could  disguise  himself  as  a  boy  without  too  great 
a  strain  upon  the  spectators'  willingness  to  accept  fic- 
tion for  fact.  Yet  even  in  Shakspere's  time,  there  may 
have  been  a  puzzling  complexity  in  the  performance 
of  "  As  You  Like  It,"  when  a  boy-actor  played  the 
part  of  a  girl  who  gave  herself  out  for  a  lad,  and  who 
then  as  a  lad  was  willing  to  let  Orlando  pretend  that 
she  was  his  lady-love. 

in 

Many  critics  have  expressed  wonder  at  the  violence 
and  coarseness  of  "  Titus  Andronicus  " ;  and  they  have 
been  unable  to  reconcile  these  crudities  with  the  gentler 
spirit  and  loftier  view  of  life  revealed  in  the  later  trage- 
dies. Here  again  an  explanation  may  be  found  in  a 
consideration  of  the  playwright's  relation  to  the  players. 
The  "Titus  Andronicus,"  which  we  have  in  Shak- 
spere's works,  is  now  believed  to  be  his  revision  or 
amalgamation  of  two  earlier  dramas  dealing  with  the 
same  subject,  both  of  which  had  been  often  performed, 
and  both  of  which  had  then  come  into  the  control  of 
the  company  of  actors  to  which  Shakspere  belonged. 


32  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

He  was  at  that  time  only  a  beginner,  with  none  of  the 
authority  which  is  the  result  of  a  series  of  successes. 
He  was  but  a  prentice  playwright,  whose  task  it  was 
to  patch  up  old  pieces  and  to  make  them  more  worthy 
of  performance  by  his  comrades.  Even  if  he  had  re- 
volted against  the  inartistic  vulgarity  of  the  earlier 
tragedies-of-blood  which  he  had  to  make  over,  even 
if  he  had  wished  to  modify  and  to  soften  their  harsh 
and  repellent  features  to  accord  with  his  own  finer 
taste,  he  would  not  have  been  permitted  to  do  so,  be- 
cause the  associated  actors  who  were  his  employers 
would  not  have  accepted  his  new  version,  if  they  found 
it  shorn  of  the  bombast  and  of  the  brutal  extravagance 
which  characterized  the  two  old  plays  and  which  gave 
the  performers  occasions  for  overacting,  the  effect  of 
which  had  been  tested  by  long  usage.  Perhaps  one  rea- 
son for  the  rant  and  the  violence  that  strikes  us  in  the 
plays  of  Shakspere's  immediate  predecessor,  Marlowe, 
especially  in  his"  Jew  of  Malta"  and  in  his  "Tam- 
burlaine,"  is  that  he  wrote  the  chief  parts  in  these 
pieces  for  Alleyne,  a  most  robustious  actor,  who  was 
nearly  seven  feet  in  height  and  who  possessed  a  pro- 
portionate physical  energy. 

Charles  Lamb,  who  had  a  humorous  relish  for  para- 
dox, once  ventured  to  suggest  that  Shakspere's  plays 
can  be  appreciated  better  in  the  study  than  on  the 
stage.  He  held  that  it  was  a  disadvantage  to  have 
Hamlet,  for  example,  forever  associated  with  the  per- 
son of  John  Philip  Kemble.  Now,  it  may  be  admitted 
at  once  that  there  are  many  things  in  Shakspere's  plays 
which  we  can  best  taste  as  we  study  them  reverently, 
book  in  hand.  But  there  are  also  many  things  which 
affect  us  far  more  powerfully  in  the  theater  than  in  the 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR         33 

library,  —  and  these  are  the  essentially  dramatic  things. 
These  are  the  things  which  we  can  be  sure  that  Shak- 
spere  meant  us  to  feel  when  we  are  witnessing  his  plays. 
He  wrote  them  to  be  acted ;  and  it  is  only  when  we  see 
them  performed  that  we  are  enabled  to  see  them  as 
their  author  intended  us  to  see  them.  It  is  to  be  noted 
also  that  Lamb  did  not  follow  his  own  advice ;  he  was 
a  most  assiduous  theatergoer,  as  almost  every  essay  of 
his  testifies.  We  shall  do  better  if  we  are  guided  rather 
by  his  practice  than  by  his  precept.  Indeed,  one  of  the 
first  rules  which  every  student  of  the  drama  ought  to 
lay  down  for  himself  is  not  to  neglect  any  opportunity 
to  see  any  play  of  Shakspere's  which  may  happen  to 
be  announced,  even  if  the  performance  does  not  pro- 
mise to  be  entirely  adequate.  Nothing  furnishes  the 
memory  more  satisfactorily  than  a  collection  of  Shak- 
sperian  performances. 

Moliere,  whose  name  must  always  be  linked  with 
those  of  Sophocles  and  Shakspere,  was  the  most  ac- 
complished comic  actor  of  his  day ;  and,  of  course,  he 
devised  a  leading  character  in  all  his  comedies  for  his 
own  acting.  To  certain  of  these  characters  he  gave  his 
own  physical  characteristics,  his  cough,  for  example, 
just  as  he  gave  lameness  to  other  characters  intended 
for  the  acting  of  his  lame  brother-in-law,  Bejart.  He 
wrote  the  gay  serving-maid  in  the  "Bourgeois  Gen- 
tilhomme"  to  utilize  at  once  the  infectious  laughter  of 
Mile.  Beauval,  who  had  only  recently  joined  his  com- 
pany. For  his  own  wife,  the  fascinating  Armande 
Bejart,  he  composed  a  succession  of  brilliant  parts, 
varied  and  veracious.  Chief  among  the  characters  he 
wrote  for  her  are  the  charming  Elmire  in  "Tartuffe" 
and  the  witty  Celimene  in  the  "  Misanthrope."  And 


84  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  tragic  heroines  of  Moliere's  younger  contemporary, 
Racine,  were  the  result  of  his  intimate  knowledge  of  the 
power  of  personation  possessed  by  Mile.  Champmesle. 

IV 

Accepting  the  fact  that  Sophocles  and  Shakspere, 
Moliere  and  Racine,  and  all  the  chief  dramatists  in  the 
long  history  of  the  theater,  have  always  composed  their 
plays  with  a  keen  appreciation  of  the  histrionic  ability 
of  the  actors  by  whom  their  pieces  were  to  be  performed , 
there  is  interest  and  profit  in  an  inquiry  as  to  the  exact 
measure  of  the  influence  which  the  actors  may  have 
exerted  upon  the  authors.  And  here  we  can  find  help 
in  considering  the  performers  of  our  own  time,  since 
the  histrionic  temperament  as  such  probably  varies 
very  little  with  the  lapse  of  centuries.  The  actor  is 
apparently  to-day  the  same  kind  of  human  being  that 
he  was  yesterday  and  the  day  before  yesterday.  In  his 
attitude  toward  his  own  calling,  toward  the  exercise 
of  his  own  art,  Roscius  probably  was  not  unlike  Gar- 
rick  and  Coquelin.  What  they  wanted,  each  of  them, 
was  a  play  in  which  he  had  a  good  part,  —  and  in  his 
eyes  a  good  part  was  one  in  which  he  could  act  to  his 
heart's  content.  A  good  part  is  one  in  which  the  actor 
has  something  to  do  or  somebody  to  personate.  He 
demands  action  and  character,  —  and  these  are  pre- 
cisely the  qualities  which  the  playgoer  also  demands. 

Therefore,  the  influence  of  the  performers  on  the  play- 
wright has  been  wholesome  in  so  far  as  their  desire  for 
good  parts  has  tended  to  stiffen  the  dramatic  action, 
to  intensify  the  passionate  climax  of  the  play.  And  this 
pressure  of  the  actors  on  the  author  has  tended  also 
to  persuade  the  poet  to  a  larger  and  a  deeper  reproduc- 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR    35 

tion  of  human  nature,  so  that  he  could  provide  the 
performers  with  characters  that  richly  rewarded  their 
faculty  of  impersonating  creatures  wholly  unlike  them- 
selves. No  doubt,  the  playwright  has  not  infrequently 
yielded  too  much  to  the  wishes  of  the  players  and  has 
been  satisfied  merely  to  compose  a  vehicle  for  the  self- 
exhibition  of  the  actors.  Of  course,  the  author  can 
claim  no  mercy  if  he  is  willing  to  subordinate  himself 
wholly  to  the  actor  and  to  put  together  what  is  but  lit- 
tle better  than  a  framework  for  the  display  of  some 
special  actor's  tricks.  This  is  what  Sardou  did  not  dis- 
dain to  do  more  than  once  for  Mme.  Sarah-Bernhardt, 
surrendering  the  proper  independence  of  his  art  so  that 
she  could  show  off  all  the  artificialities  of  hers.  "Fe- 
dora," for  example,  was  so  tightly  adjusted  to  the  clever- 
ness of  the  French  performer  that  it  lost  the  most,  of 
its  effect  when  acted  by  Signora  Duse,  because  the 
Italian  actress  found  in  its  tricky  ingenuity  no  oppor- 
tunity for  the  poignant  veracity  she  revealed  in  a  sim- 
pler and  sincerer  study  from  life,  like  Verga's  "  Caval- 
leria  Rusticana." 

Yet  an  adroit  and  self-respecting  dramatic  poet  can 
get  the  utmost  out  of  the  varied  powers  of  an  actor  of 
versatile  genius  without  any  enfeebling  complaisance 
and  without  any  unworthy  self -surrender.  And  if 
proof  of  this  assertion  were  needed,  it  could  be  found 
in  "Cyrano  de  Berg«rac."  It  is  not  too  much  to  say 
that  if  the  masterpiece  of  M.  Rostand  had  never  been 
acted  or  published  and  if  it  were  suddenly  to  be  dis- 
covered after  its  author's  death,  the  general  opinion 
would  then  be  that  it  was  a  most  ingenious  specimen 
of  the  dramatic  poem,  probably  composed  without  any 
expectation  that  it  could  ever  be  performed,  since  the 


36  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

central  figure  was  so  various  and  so  many-sided,  now 
grotesque,  and  then  lyric,  now  broadly  humorous,  and 
then  loftily  heroic,  that  the  author  could  never  have 
hoped  to  find  any  actor  multifarious  enough  to  imper- 
sonate the  character  and  to  reveal  its  contrasting  as- 
pects. But  we  happen  to  know  that  this  brilliant  play 
was  written  especially  for  a  brilliant  actor,  and  that  it 
was  put  together  with  an  eye  single  to  his  extraordinary 
range  of  personation.  Coquelin  was  an  incomparable 
comedian,  who  had  played  countless  parts,  some  lyric 
and  heroic,  some  humorous  and  grotesque.  He  had  a 
variety  so  marvelous  that  "he  seemed  to  be  not  one 
but  all  mankind's  epitome."  There  was  in  "Cyrano 
de  Bergerac"  no  demand  made  on  the  actor  that 
Coquelin  had  not  already  met  in  some  one  of  the  hun- 
dred dramas  he  had  appeared  in;  and  many  of  the 
separate  effects  he  had  achieved  in  his  best  parts  were 
carefully  combined  in  this  one  character.  There  was 
never  a  more  skilful  example  of  theatrical  tailoring 
than  M.  Rostand's  cutting  and  fitting  of  his  poetic 
fabric  to  the  exact  size  and  shape  of  Coquelin's  his- 
trionic accomplishments,  yet  this  did  not  in  any  way 
detract  from  the  originality  and  the  charm  of  the  play 
itself.  Although  it  is  a  fact  that  "  Cyrano  de  Bergerac  " 
is  what  it  is  solely  because  Coquelin  was  what  he  was, 
nevertheless  the  play  was  performed  by  many  other 
actors;  it  was  translated  into  h^alf  a  dozen  different 
languages ;  it  was  read  with  delight  by  all  who  appre- 
ciate pointed  and  polished  verse;  it  lost  nothing  of  its 
literary  value  from  the  circumstance  that  it  had  its 
origin  in  the  poet's  desire  to  write  a  great  part  for  a 
great  actor.  Other  comedians  may  attempt  to  act 
Cyrano  —  indeed,  a  score  of  other  actors  have  been 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR    37 

tempted  to  do  so;  but  Coquelin's  performance  of  the 
part  remains  inimitable  and  unapproachable.  He  was 
the  best  Cyrano  because  Cyrano  was  measured  to  fit 
him.  There  is  excellent  excuse  for  the  French  phrase 
which  declared  that  the  actor  who  first  plays  a  part 
"  creates  the  character."  This,  at  least,  is  what  Coquelin 
did  with  Cyrano. 

The  knowledge  we  chance  to  possess  that  M.  Ros- 
tand composed  this  play  specially  for  Coquelin  will 
explain  the  final  act,  which  puzzled  not  a  few  critics. 
Why  does  the  hero  die  at  the  end  of  the  play  ?  Why 
should  he  die  ?  The  piece  is  called  a  "  heroic-comedy," 
and  we  do  not  expect  to  have  a  comedy  end  with  a 
death-scene.  On  the  other  hand,  there  is  no  real  rea- 
son why  Cyrano  should  not  die,  —  that  is  to  say,  there 
is  no  logical  and  necessary  conclusion  of  the  highly 
artificial  story  which  would  require  the  hero  either  to 
pass  away  in  the  fifth  act  or  to  survive  to  fight  again 
some  other  day.  This  being  the  case,  it  is  easy  to  see 
why  M.  Rostand  chose  to  let  the  spectators  behold 
the  last  moments  of  his  hero.  It  gave  him  as  fine  a 
finish  as  any  other  possible  termination;  it  enabled 
him  to  touch  lightly  the  chords  of  pathos;  and,  above 
all  —  it  supplied  Coquelin  with  a  death-scene,  more 
or  less  of  a  novelty  even  for  that  marvelous  comedian, 
who  may  often  have  envied  Mme.  Sarah-Bernhardt 
the  many  death-scenes  which  she  has  presented  and 
which  have  permitted  her  to  draw  easily  upon  the 
tears  of  all  who  heard  her  dying  speech  and  confes- 
sion. 

Perhaps  a  few  of  those  who  have  been  surprised  that 
this  heroic-comedy  should  end  as  sadly  as  a  tragedy, 
may  have  wondered  also  why  the  old  soldier  Flambeau 


38  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

was  allowed  to  occupy  a  disproportionate  place  in  M. 
Rostand's  other  poetic  drama,  the  "Aiglon,"  wherein 
he  was  not  the  chief  figure,  —  with  the  chief  figure  of 
which,  indeed,  his  connection  seems  almost  episodic. 
Could  not  the  story  of  the  masterful  Napoleon's  weak- 
ling son  have  been  set  forth  without  dragging  in  this 
ancient  and  loquacious  warrior?  Here,  again,  the 
explanation  is  easy  when  we  are  aware  that  Flambeau, 
although  not  originally  acted  in  Paris  by  Coquelin, 
was  actually  written  for  him ;  and  that  the  origin  of  the 
play  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  the  actor  had  ex- 
pressed to  the  poet  his  desire  to  appear  as  one  of  the 
faithful  old  guard  of  the  great  Emperor.  The  stalwart 
figure  of  the  veteran,  loyal  to  his  master's  memory, 
thus  suggested  by  Coquelin,  fascinated  M.Rostand; 
but  when  the  poet  sought  for  a  plot  in  which  to  set  this 
character  to  work,  he  was  led  irresistibly  to  the  feebler 
form  of  the  puny  King  of  Rome,  the  impotent  heir  of 
a  mighty  name.  As  the  playwright  worked  out  his 
story  in  scenes  and  acts,  he  found  the  princeling  taking 
the  center  of  the  stage  and  the  old  soldier  becoming 
inevitably  a  subordinate  character,  full  of  color,  no 
doubt,  and  very  useful  in  building  up  the  situations 
of  the  play,  but  no  longer  the  focus  of  interest. 


When  we  peruse  Legouve's  "Memories  of  Sixty 
Years,"  we  learn  how  "Adrienne  Lecouvreur"  came 
to  be  composed  especially  for  Rachel,  and  we  see  why 
the  heroine  does  not  appear  in  the  opening  act  of  the 
play  to  which  she  gives  her  name,  and  why  she  first 
comes  in  view  clad  in  the  costume  of  one  of  Racine's 
characters.  And  in  the  same  interesting  and  instruc- 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR         39 

tive  reminiscences,  M.  Legouve  also  records  how  he 
wrote  a  certain  speech  in  his  earlier  piece,  "  Louise  de 
Lignerolles,"  half  a  dozen  times  because  Mile.  Mars 
insisted  that  it  was  not  what  it  ought  to  be,  until  finally 
she  told  him  that  what  she  wanted  was  something  like 
"  la-la-la  —  la."  That  is  to  say,  her  histrionic  instinct 
made  her  feel  the  emotional  rhythm  of  the  proper 
speech  for  the  character  at  that  moment  in  the  play; 
and  Legouve,  having  full  confidence  in  her  judgment, 
promptly  set  fit  words  to  the  tune  she  had  indicated. 
Every  other  dramatist  could  recall  instances  of  the 
unpremeditated  effects  he  has  achieved,  now  and  again, 
by  thus  accepting  the  hints  of  his  actors.  Many  a  great 
drama  is  the  greater  because  of  practical  suggestions 
made  by  the  actors,  just  as  many  a  great  drama  has 
been  due  to  the  desire  of  the  poet  to  profit  by  the  rich 
gift  of  some  contemporary  performer.  There  is  char- 
acteristic shrewdness  in  a  remark  which  Augier  once 
made  to  the  comedian  Regnier:  "My  experience  has 
taught  me  that  an  actor  deprives  me  of  all  that  he  does 
not  add  to  the  part  I  have  written." 

We  may  read  in  the  life  of  Bulwer  Lytton  how  he 
listened  to  the  advice  of  Macready  and  made  over 
both  the  "  Lady  of  Lyons  "  and  "  Richelieu  "  in  accord- 
ance with  the  valuable  advice  which  the  actor  gave 
him.  So  Mr.  Bram  Stoker  has  told  us  how  Henry 
Irving  felt  that  Tennyson's  "Becket,"  in  the  form  in 
which  the  poet  had  published  it,  was  not  likely  to  suc- 
ceed as  a  play,  although  it  contained  the  superb  figure 
of  the  martyred  prelate  which  the  actor-manager  was 
longing  to  personate.  Finally,  Irving  saw  the  practi- 
cability of  a  few  rather  radical  alterations,  the  suppres- 
sion of  a  scene  here,  and  the  writing  of  a  new  speech 


40  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

or  two  there.  With  fear  and  trembling,  he  took  these 
suggestions  to  Tennyson;  and  the  poet,  longing  for 
success  on  the  stage,  accepted  them  gladly,  writing 
at  once  the  added  lines  that  the  actor  wanted  and  giv- 
ing permission  for  the  omissions  and  transpositions 
that  Irving  believed  to  be  necessary. 

Here  we  find  the  actor  rising  almost  to  the  level  of 
the  poet's  collaborator ;  and  it  would  be  easy  to  collect 
many  another  illustration  of  this  harmonious  partner- 
ship between  the  creative  and  the  interpretative  artists. 
The  plot  of  "Gringoire,"  Banville's  charming  little 
play,  was  changed  for  the  better  by  the  author  in  con- 
sequence of  suggestions  from  Coquelin,  who  created 
the  part  of  the  starving  poet.  The  ingenious  turn  of 
the  story  toward  the  end  of  the  piece  was  the  invention 
of  the  comedian ;  and  when  he  proposed  this  to  the 
author,  Banville  asked  scornfully:  "Do  you  want  me 
to  write  a  play  like  Scribe?"  Coquelin  laughed  and 
replied  that  this  was  just  what  he  did  want.  "  Very 
well,  then,"  said  Banville,  smiling  in  his  turn,  "  that  is 
just  what  I  will  do!" 

Not  only  does  the  wise  dramatist  profit  by  every 
available  suggestion  of  the  actors,  and  not  only  does 
he  take  advantage  of  the  special  capabilities  of  the  per- 
formers he  may  have  in  mind  for  this  part  or  that,  he 
is  also  moved  sometimes  to  refrain  from  putting  into 
his  play  scenes  which  are  not  likely  to  be  properly 
acted  by  the  special  comedians  whom  he  expects  to 
personate  certain  characters.  Sheridan  was  the  man- 
ager of  Drury  Lane  when  he  brought  out  his  own 
"School  for  Scandal."  Every  part  in  that  glittering 
comedy  was  written  particularly  for  the  performers 
who  first  played  it ;  and  so  admirably  was  it  then  per- 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR    41 

formed  as  a  whole  that  Charles  Lamb  thought  it  some 
compensation  for  growing  old  that  he  had  been  born 
early  enough  to  see  the  "School  for  Scandal"  in  its 
glory.  Indeed,  the  several  performers  were  so  closely 
fitted  that  when  a  friend  asked  the  author-manager 
why  his  comedy  did  not  contain  a  love-scene  for  the 
two  characters  whose  marriage  brings  it  to  an  end, 
Sheridan  was  ready  with  the  obvious  answer  that 
Smith  and  Miss  Hopkins  could  not  make  love.  Now, 
Smith  was  the  original  Charles  Surface,  and  Maria  was 
first  acted  by  Miss  Priscilla  Hopkins  (afterward  the 
wife  of  John  Philip  Kemble). 

Evidence  of  this  adjustment  of  the  story  of  a  play 
to  the  limitations  of  the  performers  for  whom  it  was 
intended,  can  be  found  abundantly  in  certain  of  the 
comedies  of  John  Lyly,  written  for  the  Children  of 
Paul's,  one  of  the  companies  of  boy-actors  in  vogue 
in  the  earlier  days  of  Queen  Elizabeth.  In  these  pol- 
ished pieces  of  suave  rhetoric  and  artificial  sentiment, 
there  is  nothing  of  the  terror  and  of  the  horror  which 
characterized  many  of  the  contemporary  plays  written 
for  the  full-grown  performers  of  the  regular  theaters. 
There  is  no  rude  power,  no  rant,  no  bombast ;  all  is 
decorous,  and  everything  is  suppressed  which  is  likely 
to  be  too  exacting  for  their  youthful  inexperience  of  life. 

And  this  same  artful  adaptation  of  a  plot  to  the 
performers  for  whose  use  it  was  devised  can  be  seen 
also  in  the  earliest  of  English  comedies  that  has  come 
down  to  us,  "Ralph  Roister  Doister,"  written  by 
Udall,  the  master  of  Eton,  for  performance  by  his  own 
pupils.  For  all  its  imitation  of  Plautus  in  its  external 
form,  this  English  comic  play  smacks  of  the  soil ;  and 
it  has  an  obvious  likeness  —  in  its  robust  fun,  in  its 


42  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

frequent  horse-play,  and  in  its  occasional  snatches  of 
song  —  to  the  nondescript  pieces  which  undergradu- 
ates undertake  for  their  own  pleasure  to-day.  "  Ralph 
Roister  Doister"  is  just  the  sort  of  bold  and  hearty 
farce  which  mature  schoolboys  could  perform  with 
zest  and  with  unfailing  effect.  And  its  successive  epi- 
sodes made  no  demands  upon  the  original  performers 
to  which  they  were  not  likely  to  be  equal.  In  fact,  a 
careful  examination  of  this  unpretending  little  play 
seems  to  suggest  that  the  Eton  schoolmaster  had  a 
premonition  of  the  truth  which  the  later  Scribe  once 
expressed  to  Legouve.  The  wily  French  playwright 
declared  that  dramatists  did  well  to  study  the  qualities 
of  the  contemporary  actors,  but  that  there  was  a  more 
constant  advantage  in  availing  one's  self  also  of  the 
defects  of  these  performers,  —  "since  their  merits 
might  abandon  them,  whereas  their  faults  would  never 
leave  them." 

This  may  have  been  said  more  or  less  in  jest;  and 
yet  it  has  a  kernel  of  truth.  The  playwright  needs  to 
take  stock  of  his  performers,  and  if  he  can  find  his 
advantage  in  utilizing  their  failings,  so  much  the  better 
for  him,  —  although,  of  course,  it  is  their  real  endow- 
ment that  he  will  utilize  the  more  often.  And  he  may 
gain  by  considering  special  actors  while  he  is  compos- 
ing his  play,  even  if  he  may  not  actually  expect  that 
they  will  be  employed  in  the  performance  of  that  piece. 
Although  these  special  actors  may  be  unavailable,  per- 
haps because  they  are  engaged  elsewhere  or  because 
they  have  retired  from  the  stage,  the  dramatist  may 
find  a  stimulus  to  his  invention,  if  not  to  his  imagina- 
tion, in  keeping  in  mind  the  personality  of  these  per- 
formers while  he  is  composing  his  play. 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  ACTOR         43 

In  fact,  the  more  closely  we  study  the  history  of 
dramatic  literature,  and  the  more  sharply  we  analyze 
the  structure  of  the  masterpieces  of  the  drama,  the 
more  firmly  we  become  convinced  that  the  dramatic 
poets  of  every  age  and  of  every  race  have  never  failed 
to  weigh  scrupulously  the  gifts,  the  deficiencies,  and  the 
special  qualities  of  the  various  performers  upon  whom 
they  had  to  rely  for  the  proper  presentation  of  their 
plays  to  the  public.  And  this  has  been  for  our  pleasure 
as  well  as  for  their  profit.  Mme.  de  Sevigne  accused 
Racine  of  "writing  plays  for  la  Champmesle,  and  not 
for  posterity."  No  doubt  Racine  was  guilty  of  the 
charge;  but  as  it  has  happened,  the  plays  that  fitted 
Mile,  de  Champmesle  have  succeeded  also  in  retaining 
the  admiration  of  posterity.  They  survive  as  the  unex- 
celled masterpieces  of  French  tragedy. 


CHAPTER   III 

THE   INFLUENCE   OF  THE  THEATER 

It  is  obvious  that  the  general  spectacle  presented  by  the  interior 
of  a  Greek  theater  during  the  representation  of  a  drama  must  have 
been  quite  unlike  anything  we  are  accustomed  to  in  modern  times. 
The  open-air  buildings,  the  performance  in  broad  daylight,  the  vast 
crowds  of  spectators,  the  chorus  grouped  together  in  the  center  — 
all  these  characteristics  of  a  Greek  theatrical  exhibition  must  have 
combined  to  produce  a  scene  to  which  there  is  no  exact  parallel  at 
the  present  day.  This  fact  should  be  kept  clearly  in  view.  —  A.  E. 
HAIGH,  The  Attic  Theater. 


IN  every  period  when  the  literature  of  any  language 
has  been  characterized  by  abundant  dramatic  produc- 
tivity, the  playwright  will  be  found  to  have  composed 
his  plays  in  accordance  with  the  conditions  of  the 
actual  theater  of  his  own  time.  He  may  not  have  liked 
these  conditions  and  he  may  have  believed  that  they 
could  be  bettered ;  but  he  has  always  begun  by  accept- 
ing them,  whatever  they  might  be.  He  has  done  this 
necessarily  and  inevitably,  whether  he  himself  was 
truly  a  dramatic  poet  like  Sophocles  and  Shakspere  or 
merely  an  ingenious  stage-craftsman  like  Kotzebue 
and  Scribe.  What  the  playwrights  of  every  age  have 
done  instinctively  and  without  hesitation,  the  histori- 
ans of  literature  are  now  beginning  to  perceive;  and 
only  a  few  of  them  have  yet  grasped  the  full  significance 
of  the  fact  that  it  is  impossible  justly  to  appreciate  the 
art  of  the  truly  dramatic  poet,  Sophocles  or  Shakspere, 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER      45 

Moliere  or  Ibsen,  without  a  clear  understanding  of  the 
chief  circumstances  of  an  actual  performance  in  the 
particular  theater  for  which  the  dramatist  prepared 
his  plays,  and  to  the  size  and  shape  of  which,  and  to 
the  scenic  appliances  of  which,  he  had  to  adjust  the 
construction  of  his  story. 

We  are  now  well  aware  that  there  have  been  many 
types  of  theater  in  different  countries  and  at  different 
times,  most  of  them  varying  very  widely  from  our  snug 
modern  playhouses.  We  all  recognize  that  the  im- 
mense outdoor  theater  of  the  Athenians  was  as  unlike 
as  possible  to  the  smaller  half-roofed  cockpit  of  the 
Londoners  under  Elizabeth,  and  also  to  the  long  nar- 
row tennis-court  of  the  Parisians  under  Louis  XIV. 
But  while  these  differences  between  the  theaters  of 
earlier  periods  may  be  a  matter  of  common  knowledge, 
we  do  not  always  apply  our  information  when  we  under- 
take to  discuss  the  dramaturgic  skill  of  the  playwrights 
of  these  several  epochs.  We  must  always  keep  in  mind 
the  extent  to  which  the  theater  has  often  dictated  to 
the  author  what  he  could  put  into  his  play  and  what 
he  had  to  leave  out,  and  how  he  had  to  present  what  he 
desired  to  set  forth.  We  ought  to  give  full  weight  to 
the  pressure  exerted  on  the  playwright  by  the  changing 
conditions  of  the  playhouses  of  successive  centuries,  — • 
by  the  size  of  the  theater,  for  one  thing,  which  may  be 
so  huge  as  to  forbid  the  author's  choice  of  any  but 
broad  and  simple  themes,  —  by  the  elaboration  of 
heavy  scenery,  which  may  impose  on  him  the  duty  of 
compacting  his  plot  so  that  he  will  need  few  changes 
of  place,  —  or  by  the  improved  modern  modes  of 
artificial  illumination  (candles  first,  then  oil-lamps, 
after  a  while  gas,  and  finally  electricity),  all  of  which 


46  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

have  wrought  in  turn  significant  modifications  of  dra- 
maturgic method.  For  example,  it  is  only  as  we  come 
to  a  realizing  sense  of  the  influence  exerted  upon  the 
art  of  the  dramatist  by  the  specific  conditions  of  each 
of  the  special  types  of  theater  which  have  existed  each 
in  its  own  time  and  place,  that  we  can  measure  the 
wisdom  of  Shakspere  in  rejecting  the  advice  of  Sidney 
to  model  his  plays  after  those  of  the  Greek  dramatists ; 
and  that  we  can  gage  also  the  unwisdom  of  Tennyson 
in  taking  Shakspere's  histories  as  the  pattern  of  his 
own  poetic  dramas,  composed  centuries  later,  when 
the  conditions  of  the  English  theater  had  entirely 
changed. 

The  critics  of  any  particular  period  of  the  drama 
have  not  always  been  familiar  with  the  conditions 
existing  during  other  periods.  The  historians  of  Greek 
literature  are  acquainted  with  our  modern  playhouses 
and  they  are  now  studying  the  ruins  of  the  theaters 
still  accessible  in  Greece  and  in  the  Grecian  colonies ; 
but  they  have  paid  little  attention  to  the  methods  of 
presenting  plays  in  the  Middle  Ages,  at  first  in  the 
churches,  and  later,  on  platforms  in  the  market-places. 
The  historians  of  English  literature  have  scarcely  yet 
attained  to  a  fairly  clear  perception  of  the  way  in  which 
plays  were  acted  under  the  Tudors,  and  they  have  not 
yet  seized  the  full  significance  of  the  changes  which 
resulted  during  the  Restoration  from  the  introduction 
of  painted  scenery  and  of  artificial  light.  The  schol- 
ars who  knew  only  one  manifestation  of  the  drama 
have  rarely  possessed  the  perspective  which  would 
be  supplied  to  them  by  a  knowledge  of  other  aspects 
in  the  other  periods  when  the  drama  was  flourishing. 
There  is  a  striking  unity  in  the  drama  as  we  trace  its 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER   47 

development  down  through  the  ages ;  its  essential  prin- 
ciples are  always  the  same,  since  the  aim  of  the  real 
dramatist  has  varied  little,  whether  he  was  a  Greek 
of  old,  a  Frenchman  of  the  seventeenth  century  or  a 
Scandinavian  of  the  nineteenth.  And  his  methods  were 
affected  by  traditions  still  surviving  from  the  play- 
houses of  an  earlier  generation.  These  traditions  the 
dramatist  profits  by  even  if  they  are  no  longer  in  exact 
accord  with  the  actual  conditions  of  the  theater  for 
which  he  is  writing;  and  so  we  find  the  Elizabethan 
playwrights  making  use  of  the  two  doors  on  opposite 
sides  of  the  stage  to  indicate  two  wholly  distinct  places, 
—  a  device  which  is  apparently  a  survival  from  the 
several  "mansions"  of  the  French  miracle-plays.  In 
fact,  it  is  impossible  really  to  understand  the  drama- 
turgic methods  in  vogue  at  any  particular  period  with- 
out taking  into  consideration  the  circumstances  of  per- 
formance at  least  half  a  century  earlier. 

No  one,  it  may  be  noted,  has  undertaken  to  trace 
the  slow  development  of  the  art  of  the  scene-painter, 
distinguishing  sharply  between  true  scene-painting  as 
we  now  know  it,  a  realistic  perspective  intended  to  re- 
produce the  place  itself,  and  that  very  different  thing, 
the  building  up  in  miniature  of  the  house  or  of  a  part 
of  the  house  (such  as  we  find  in  the  Middle  Ages  and 
again  in  the  Italian  comedy-of -masks) ,  which  is  the 
work  of  carpenters  completed  by  the  work  of  house- 
painters.  No  one  has  collected  the  many  references 
which  make  it  plain  that  properties  of  all  sorts  — 
altars,  thrones,  arbors,  etc.  —  were  in  use  long  before 
there  was  any  attempt  at  true  scene-painting.  And  no 
one  has  ever  made  a  collection  of  plans  of  theaters, 
all  drawn  to  the  same  scale,  so  that  we  could  see  at  a 


48  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

glance  how  immense  was  the  theater  of  Dionysus  at 
Athens  and  how  small  the  tennis-court  wherein  Moliere 
acted.  With  the  aid  of  a  collection  of  these  plans  and 
with  the  collateral  information  now  available,  we  could 
follow  the  changes  in  the  method  of  performance  from 
Sophocles  to  Ibsen,  and  we  should  be  led  to  one  inter- 
esting conclusion,  —  that  instead  of  there  being  only 
two  types  of  theater,  as  is  often  assumed,  the  ancient 
and  the  modern,  there  are  in  reality  many,  of  which 
the  medieval  is  not  the  least  important. 

We  should  be  induced  to  acknowledge  that  the  the- 
ater in  England  for  which  Marlowe  and  Shakspere  and 
Jonson  wrote,  and  the  theater  in  Spain  for  which  Lope 
de  Vega  and  Calderon  wrote,  were  neither  of  them  really 
modern ;  and  they  were  both  medieval  in  their  methods 
or  at  least  semi-medieval.  We  should  be  made  to  see 
that  Moliere  is  apparently  the  earliest  of  the  moderns, 
in  that  his  plays  now  need  no  readjustment,  no  editing, 
no  transposing  of  any  kind,  to  fit  them  for  the  play- 
houses of  to-day.  And  we  should  discover  that  a  very 
striking  change  in  the  practices  of  the  playwrights  was 
brought  about  in  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, when  the  stage  was  at  last  abundantly  lighted  in 
every  part  by  electricity  and  when  the  curving  bow  of 
the  footlights  was  cut  back  to  the  curtain,  which  there- 
after rose  and  fell  inside  a  picture-frame. 


The  difference  between  the  playhouse  in  which  we 
can  to-day  see  one  of  Mr.  Clyde  Fitch's  plays  and  the 
playhouse  in  which  Sheridan's  comedies  were  originally 
given,  is  greater  than  the  difference  between  Sheridan's 
Drury  Lane  and  the  house  for  which  Congreve  wrote 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER       49 

and  in  which  Betterton  acted.  And  in  its  turn,  this 
Restoration  playhouse  was  very  unlike  the  Elizabethan 
theater  for  which  Shakspere  wrote  and  in  which  Bur- 
bage  acted.  Even  more  apparent  is  the  difference 
between  the  theater  of  Dionysus  at  Athens  and  the 
Roman  theater  at  Orange,  in  the  south  of  France. 
These  several  theaters,  ancient  and  modern,  are  sharply 
distinguished  from  one  another  by  their  size,  by  their 
shape,  by  their  method  of  illumination,  by  the  absence 
or  presence  of  real  scenery,  and  also  by  the  arrange- 
ment of  the  seats  for  the  spectators ;  and  as  we  study 
these  successive  changes,  we  are  confirmed  in  the  con- 
viction that  the  physical  conditions  of  the  playhouse 
must  always  have  exerted  a  powerful  influence  upon 
the  dramatic  poets  who  followed  each  other  down 
through  the  centuries. 

The  theater  of  Dionysus  at  Athens  is  accepted  as 
the  earliest  of  the  great  Greek  theaters,  yet  it  is  so  well 
preserved  that  it  is  possible  for  a  traveler  now  to  sit 
on  its  marble  benches  and  look  down  into  the  orchestra 
where  the  chorus  circled  with  solemn  chant  about  the 
altar  of  the  god  in  whose  honor  the  drama  had  come 
into  being.1  For  a  long  time,  the  primitive  Greek  plays 
were  acted  in  the  market-place,  and  the  spectators  sat 
on  temporary  benches.  After  one  of  these  rows  of 
seats  had  broken  down,  a  space  was  leveled  at  the  foot 
of  the  Acropolis,  and  the  spectators  grouped  them- 
selves on  the  hollow  hillside  above.  In  time,  the  slope 
was  rounded  out,  and  from  the  level  space  where  the 
actors  stood,  tiers  of  marble  seats  rose  high  up  the 
shoulders  of  the  mountain.  The  orchestra  itself  was 
paved ;  and  some  kind  of  low  structure  must  have  been 
1  See  illustration  facing  page  74. 


50  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

erected  behind  the  semi-circular  space  of  the  orchestra 
to  serve  as  a  background  for  the  movements  of  the 
actors  and  for  the  evolutions  of  the  chorus.  It  is  gen- 
erally admitted  now  that  there  was  no  elevated  stage 
in  the  Attic  theater;  and  the  acting  took  place  in  the 
orchestra  itself,  the  semi-circular  level  space  which 
bowed  out  into  the  curving  tiers  of  seats.  It  is  coming 
to  be  admitted  also  that  there  was  no  scenery,  although 
there  may  have  been  properties.  Of  course,  the  author 
was  free  to  avail  himself  of  the  doors  and  of  the  roof 
of  the  low  structure  which  shut  in  the  orchestra,  and 
which  probably  served  also  for  a  dressing-room  for  all 
those  who  took  part  in  the  performance. 

The  arc  of  the  semi-circle,  where  this  structure 
stood,  was  seventy- two  feet  long;  and  the  farthest 
point  of  the  prolonged  semi-circle  was  about  the  same 
distance  away.  And  above  this  level  space,  there  rose 
nearly  eighty  tiers  of  seats.  It  has  been  asserted  that 
more  than  twenty  thousand  spectators  could  be  present 
at  a  performance.  As  we  sit  on  those  benches  to-day, 
and  glance  down  to  the  orchestra  and  see  how  small  a 
single  figure  looks  so  far  away,  and  how  impossible  it 
is  to  perceive  any  play  of  feature,  we  are  not  surprised 
that  the  Greek  actors  were  raised  on  lofty  boots  and 
wore  masks  that  towered  above  their  heads,  increasing 
their  apparent  stature.  We  recognize  that  under  such 
circumstances  the  dramatist  was  wise  to  avoid  all  acts 
of  physical  violence  impossible  to  performers  thus 
accoutered.  We  perceive  that  he  was  well  advised 
when  he  preferred  a  plot  already  familiar  to  his  spec- 
tators, so  that  they  would  not  lose  the  thread  of  the 
story,  even  if  a  sudden  gust  of  wind  from  the  ^Egean 
might  now  and  again  wrap  the  floating  draperies  about 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER       51 

the  heads  of  the  performers  and  for  a  moment  deprive 
the  audience  of  the  spoken  words.  We  can  approve 
also  his  practical  shrewdness  in  choosing  a  theme  not 
only  already  known  in  its  outline,  but  also  possessing 
a  bold  simplicity,  which  demanded  a  massive  treatment. 
We  can  understand  more  clearly  the  function  of  the 
chorus,  which  supplied  a  restful  lyrical  variety,  and 
also  that  spectacular  element  which  appeals  to  the  eye 
and  which  seems  to  be  required  to  hold  the  attention 
of  an  immense  gathering  in  the  open  air.  And  we  end 
by  seeing  the  obvious  likeness  which  exists  between 
one  of  the  old  Greek  tragedies  and  one  of  our  broader 
modern  music-dramas  of  the  Wagnerian  type,  if  this 
should  be  performed  out-of-doors. 

In  building  their  playhouses,  as  in  most  of  their 
other  artistic  endeavors,  the  Romans  followed  in  the 
footsteps  of  the  Athenians.1  They  modified  the  Greek 
theater  to  suit  their  own  needs.  Giving  up  the  seats 
on  the  curving  hillside  which  enabled  the  audience  to 
look  down  on  the  actors,  they  filled  the  orchestra  with 
benches,  and  they  were  therefore  forced  to  raise  up  a 
stage  so  that  the  spectators  could  see  the  performers. 
This  stage  was  a  long  and  narrow  shelf;  and  it  had 
behind  it  a  high  wall,  pierced  with  doors  and  richly 
decorated  with  columns  and  statues.  This  stately  piece 
of  ornate  architecture  was  the  unchanging  background 
for  every  play ;  and  its  doors  were  utilized  as  the  plot 
might  demand.  In  the  theater  at  Orange  in  the  south 
of  France,  the  stage  was  about  one  hundred  and  ninety 
feet  wide.  The  radius  of  the  auditorium  was  more 
than  one  hundred  and  eighty  feet.  There  was  accom- 
modation for  six  thousand  spectators.  Although  this 
1  See  illustration  facing  page  140. 


52  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

theater  at  Orange  is  a  little  late,  the  earlier  Roman 
playhouses  were  not  unlike  it  in  size  and  in  shape. 

Such  a  theater  seems  to  be  better  suited  for  panto- 
mime and  for  the  feats  of  acrobats  than  for  a  drama 
dealing  truthfully  with  the  pathos  and  the  humor  of 
life.  Perhaps  we  can  catch  a  glimpse  of  one  reason 
why  the  delicately  polished  comedies  of  Terence  failed 
to  please  his  contemporaries  when  they  were  performed. 
The  style  of  that  accomplished  man  of  letters  could 
hardly  be  expected  to  convey  much  pleasure  to  tfre 
audience  collected  in  a  very  large  theater  of  this  type. 
The  Comedie-Fran9aise,  on  one  of  its  visits  to  Orange, 
ventured  to  perform  there  a  neo-Greek  playlet,  the 
"Ilote"  of  M.  Paul  Ferrier;  but  although  this  had 
been  successful  in  Paris  at  the  Theatre  Fran9ais,  it 
was  found  to  evaporate  into  immediate  insignificance 
in  the  vast  space  of  the  old  Roman  theater.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  "  (Edipus  "  of  Sophocles,  and  one  or  two 
other  French  versions  of  massively  planned  Greek 
tragedies,  were  really  more  effective  when  performed  at 
Orange  than  they  ever  had  been  in  Paris,  as  though 
they  demanded  a  larger  frame  than  any  modern  theater 
could  provide. 

Gaston  Boissier,  who  was  not  only  one  of  the  most 
learned  students  of  Latin  literature  but  also  one  of  the 
acutest  of  critics,  visited  the  substantial  ruin  at  Orange 
and  also  most  of  the  other  surviving  Roman  theaters. 
As  a  result  of  these  investigations,  he  declared  that 
when  he  sought  to  evoke  a  vision  of  the  spacious  Latin 
playhouse  and  to  reconstruct  a  mental  image  of  it  as  it 
must  have  been  in  the  full  splendor  of  the  imperial 
period,  he  believed  that  he  was  enabled  thereby  better 
to  understand  the  pieces  which  were  performed  in 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER       53 

these  stately  edifices.  "No  doubt,  this  theater  was 
made  for  these  plays,  but  they  were  also  made  for  this 
theater;  they  were  instinctively  accommodated  and 
appropriated  to  the  place  where  they  were  to  be  repre- 
sented. The  actual  circumstances  of  their  performance 
imposed  on  them  certain  necessities,  which  they  had 
to  accept  and  which  in  time  erected  themselves  into 
rules.  It  would  be  easy  to  prove  that  many  of  their 
qualities  and  of  their  defects,  for  which  subtle  expla- 
nations have  been  sought,  have,  in  fact,  no  other  origin 
than  this  obligation  of  the  dramatist  to  conform  to  the 
conditions  of  performance  in  the  only  type  of  theater 
with  which  the  Latin  dramatists  were  familiar."  And 
the  shrewd  Frenchman  then  pointed  out  the  skill  with 
which  the  artful  Plautus  "  solved  the  problem  of  getting 
himself  listened  to  (in  a  vast  uncovered  space)  by  in- 
attentive and  noisy  spectators,  who  had  at  bottom  little 
real  liking  for  the  entertainment  which  was  offered  to 
them." 

in 

In  the  Middle  Ages,  the  tradition  of  the  Greek  the- 
ater, and  even  that  of  the  Roman,  seems  to  have  been 
lost ;  and  we  find  a  new  dramatic  form  evolved  spon- 
taneously out  of  the  ritual  of  the  church.  Just  as  the 
Ara  Cceli  in  Rome  still  exhibits  at  Christmas  a  wax- 
work reproduction  of  the  infant  Jesus  cradled  in  the 
rude  manger  of  the  inn,  so  the  medieval  priests  put 
into  dialogue  and  presented  in  action  other  episodes 
of  the  Birth  and  also  of  the  Resurrection.  Choristers, 
with  shepherd's  crooks  in  their  hands,  came  in  by  the 
eastern  portal  and  advanced  through  the  congrega- 
tion, singing  the  glad  tidings,  until  they  drew  near  to 
the  manger  within  the  chancel,  in  front  of  which  they 


54  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

might  meet  other  officials  of  the  church,  representing 
the  Three  Wise  Men .  Later,  a  place  apart  was  found  for 
Herod  and  his  soldiers ;  and  other  places,  here  and  there, 
in  the  vast  cathedral,  were  assigned  to  other  actors  in 
other  episodes  of  Christ's  career,  —  the  Temple,  for 
one,  and,  for  another,  the  house  of  the  High  Priest. 

These  several  places  were  called  "stations."  When 
the  swollen  mystery  was  turned  out  of  the  cathedral, 
and  when  its  presentation  was  undertaken  by  laymen, 
the  traditions  established  in  the  church  were  carefully 
preserved  with  only  the  necessary  modifications.  In 
one  manuscript  of  a  mystery  acted  in  Valenciennes  in 
1547,  there  is  a  miniature  of  the  stage  on  which  it  was 
acted ;  and  from  this  picture  a  model  has  been  made, 
which  gives  us  a  good  idea  of  a  medieval  performance 
in  France.1  The  stage  was  a  shallow  platform  about 
one  hundred  and  thirty  feet  in  length ;  and  at  the  back, 
in  a  long  line,  were  little  houses  representing  each  of 
the  several  stations,  the  various  places  required  in  the 
course  of  the  drama.  At  the  extreme  right  of  the  spec- 
tators is  Heaven,  raised  high  on  pillars;  and  at  the  ex- 
treme left  is  Hell-mouth.  Ranged  between  were  the 
Inn,  the  Temple,  the  House  of  the  High  Priest,  and  the 
other  necessary  "  mansions  "  (as  the  French  termed  the 
stations) ,  used  only  when  they  were  called  for  by  the  spe- 
cial episodes  of  the  story,  the  rest  of  the  acting  taking 
place  anywhere  on  the  stage,  which  was  accepted  as  a 
neutral  ground  whereon  anything  might  be  represented. 

In  England,  instead  of  massing  the  stations  at  the 

back  of  a  long  stage,  the  more  general  practice  was  to 

set  them  up  separately  on  wagons,  like  the  floats  of  a 

Mardi  Gras  parade,  and  they  were  called  "pageants." 

1  See  illustration  facing  page  292. 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER       55 

But  even  in  England,  more  or  less  of  the  acting  was 
done,  not  on  the  floats,  but  in  the  street  itself,  in  the 
midst  of  the  assembled  spectators,  just  as  had  been 
the  case  when  the  earlier  performances  were  given  in 
the  church  itself.  The  street  was  then  the  neutral 
ground  which  might  be  supposed  to  be  anywhere,  — 
the  shore  in  front  of  Noah's  Ark,  or  the  space  between 
the  palace  of  Herod  and  the  house  of  the  High  Priest 
(these  two  dwellings  being  represented  by  two  pageants 
brought  forward  at  the  same  time).  This  is  the  tradi- 
tion which  survived  in  the  Elizabethan  theater,  where 
the  acting  took  place  also  on  a  neutral  ground.  The 
stage  was  only  a  platform  unincumbered  by  scenery, 
and  it  was  therefore  free  to  represent  any  needed  place. 
At  right  and  left,  there  might  be  two  doors,  which 
properly  labelled,  could  stand,  if  need  be,  one  for  Asia 
and  the  other  for  Africa. 

Under  the  later  Tudors,  there  sprang  into  being 
several  companies  of  actors,  patronized  by  the  great 
nobles.  They  went  about  acting  where  they  could,  in 
palaces  and  in  townhalls,  on  village  greens  and  in  the 
courtyards  of  inns.  They  carried  a  few  properties, 
swords  and  scepters,  and  the  like ;  but  they  knew  no- 
thing of  scenery  painted  on  frames.  When  at  last  they 
were  forbidden  to  act  in  the  inns  of  London,  they  went 
a  little  outside  the  city  and  put  up  playhouses  of  their 
own.  They  had  no  models  to  go  by,  for  they  knew  as 
little  about  the  theaters  of  Greece  and  Rome  as  their 
medieval  predecessors  had  known.  But  they  had  found 
that  the  courtyards  of  inns,  hollow  rectangles  girt  with 
galleries,  were  suitable  for  their  purpose ;  and  so  it  is 
that  the  playhouses  that  they  built  were  very  like  the 
inn  courtyards,  —  with  the  inn  itself  omitted.  They 


56  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

put  up  a  square  or  circular  or  oval  structure,  open  to 
the  sky,  except  over  the  galleries,  and  except  also  over 
Ihe  back  part  of  the  platform  which  jutted  into  the 
yard  where  the  groundlings  stood. 

We  have  the  contract  for  the  building  of  one  of  these 
playhouses,  from  which  we  learn  that  it  was  square, 
eighty  feet  on  each  side,  and  that  the  platform-stage 
was  forty- three  feet  wide.1  Two  pieces  of  arras  (or  of 
cloth  painted  like  tapestry)  were  hung  from  the  gal- 
lery at  the  back  where  it  crossed  the  platform.  It  was 
through  these  curtains,  or  through  the  two  doors  one 
on  either  side,  that  the  actor  made  his  entrances  and 
his  exits.  The  draperies  could  be  looped  back  to  re- 
veal a  supposed  cave  or  study,  while  the  gallery  above 
could  serve  as  a  balcony  or  as  the  outer  wall  of  a  castle, 
or  merely  as  another  place  from  which  some  character 
could  oversee  what  took  place  on  the  stage  below.  The 
platform,  although  it  had  no  painted  scenery,  was  often 
enriched  with  properties,  —  thrones  and  arbors  and 
wells,  —  as  these  might  be  called  for  by  the  story. 

This  platform-stage  was  the  neutral  ground  whereon 
any  character  might  meet  any  other  character  without 
any  question  as  to  the  exact  spot  where  the  meeting 
was  supposed  to  take  place.  If  the  action  of  the  play 
could  be  made  clearer  by  particularizing  the  special 
place,  then  one  of  the  characters  was  careful  to  say 
where  they  were  supposed  to  be.  But  the  spectators, 
some  of  them  seated  on  stools  on  the  stage  itself  and 
almost  mingled  with  the  actors,  some  of  them  standing 
in  the  yard  on  three  sides  of  the  platform,  and  some 
of  them  accommodated  more  comfortably  in  the  pri- 
vate boxes  of  the  galleries,  asked  no  questions  about 
1  See  illustration  facing  page  238. 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER      57 

place  or  time ;  they  wanted  to  see  a  story  set  forth  in 
all  its  phases,  and  they  cared  nothing  to  know  just 
where  it  was  that  any  two  characters  were  supposed 
to  be  at  the  very  moment  when  the  plot  was  thickening 
to  a  crisis.  The  playwright  had  the  largest  liberty  of 
time  and  place,  a  larger  license  than  was  good  for  most 
of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists,  who  did  not  compact 
their  plots  and  who  were  amply  satisfied  if  they  suc- 
ceeded in  interesting  their  unexacting  audiences.  And 
when  we  contrast  this  London  theater  for  which  Shak- 
spere  wrote  with  the  Athenian  theater  for  which  Sopho- 
cles wrote,  we  get  a  glimpse  of  the  gulf  that  yawns  be- 
tween the  English  drama  and  the  Greek.  We  perceive 
one  of  the  chief  causes  of  the  differences  between  them ; 
and  we  see  at  the  same  time  how  distinctly  the  form 
of  each  was  conditioned  by  the  circumstances  of  its 
performance. 

In  his  ample  and  acute  study  of  the  "  Tragic  Drama 
of  the  Greeks,"  Haigh  called  attention  to  the  fact  that 
one  of  the  chief  characteristics  of  the  Shaksperian 
drama,  "the  calm  and  tranquil  manner  in  which  the 
scenes  were  brought  to  a  close,  originated  in  the  casual 
circumstance  that  the  old  English  theater  had  no  drop- 
scene  ;  the  successive  portions  of  a  play  were  terminated, 
not  by  a  curtain,  but  by  the  actors  walking  off  the  stage ; 
and  for  this  reason  it  was  impossible  to  finish  up  with 
a  climax,  as  is  now  the  invariable  custom."  And  Haigh 
then  remarked  that  the  unity  and  simplicity  of  Greek 
tragedy  were  due  to  the  force  of  circumstance,  espe- 
cially to  the  influence  exerted  by  the  constant  presence 
of  the  chorus,  which  prevented  any  change  of  place. 

In  one  respect,  similarity  in  the  circumstances  of 
performance  brought  about  a  significant  similarity  of 


58  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

treatment  in  the  Greek  drama  and  in  the  Elizabethan. 
In  the  theater  of  Dionysus  at  Athens,  as  in  the  Globe 
Theater  in  London,  there  was  no  painted  scenery,  a 
theatrical  adjunct  as  unknown  to  Shakspere  as  to 
Sophocles;  and  therefore  the  dramatic  poet  was  not 
only  tempted  to  put  into  his  dialogue  the  description 
of  any  special  place  which  he  wished  to  call  up  in  the 
minds  of  the  spectators,  he  was  actually  compelled  to 
do  this,  since  he  could  accomplish  his  purpose  in  no 
other  way.  From  the  descriptions  of  the  wild  and  lonely 
spot  where  the  hero  is  fixed  to  the  rock,  given  by  one 
or  another  character  in  the  earliest  episodes  of  the 
"  Prometheus  Bound"  of  JSschylus,  some  commenta- 
tors have  chosen  to  assume  the  existence  of  some  sort 
of  scenery  which  would  suggest  to  the  assembled  mul- 
titude the  gloom  and  horror  of  the  spot.  But  this  is 
an  unwarranted  inference,  for  if  an  adequate  scenic 
representation  of  the  place  had  been  possible,  the  poet 
would  not  have  felt  called  upon  to  put  its  description 
into  the  mouths  of  his  characters.  We  do  not  find 
Ibsen  or  Rostand  delaying  the  action  of  their  dramas 
by  any  detailed  description  of  the  background  which 
the  spectators  have  now  before  their  eyes.  For  the 
modern  dramatic  poet,  any  such  digression  would  be 
an  impertinent  superfluity,  since  he  knows  that  he  can 
rely  on  the  skilful  scene-painters  to  represent  pictori- 
ally  the  outward  aspects  of  the  place  where  the  action 
passes.  To  the  audience  of  JSschylus,  as  to  the  audi- 
ence of  Shakspere,  poetic  description  was  not  super- 
fluous or  impertinent;  it  might  be  helpful.  And  we  all 
know  how  freely  Shakspere  availed  himself  of  this 
privilege  of  pictorial  description,  a  privilege  denied 
to  the  dramatic  poet  of  to-day. 


THE   INFLUENCE    OF   THE   THEATER      59 

IV 

In  France,  the  strolling  companies  had  become  ac- 
customed, not  to  the  courtyards  of  inns,  but  to  tennis- 
courts  ;  and  it  is  in  an  altered  tennis-court  that  we  find 
Moliere  acting  more  than  once.  A  tennis-court  was 
a  rectangle  of  a  little  less  than  one  hundred  feet  long 
by  a  little  less  than  forty  feet  in  width.  It  had  galleries 
along  the  sides ;  and  it  had  a  solid  roof,  and  therefore 
it  had  to  be  lighted  by  candles.  A  stage  was  easily  put 
up  at  one  end,  shut  in  by  a  proscenium  arch,  in  which 
a  curtain  probably  rolled  up  at  the  beginning  of  every 
act.  But  here  again  we  have  spectators  seated  on  the 
sides  of  the  stage,  not  on  separate  stools,  but  on  benches 
perpendicular  to  the  footlights ;  and  again  we  find  the 
actors  surrounded  by  the  audience  as  in  England 
and  in  Greece.  Behind  these  benches  there  might  be 
painted  scenery,  although  this  was  at  first  little  more 
than  a  drop-cloth.  The  French  dramatists,  following 
Corneille's  example,  had  accepted  the  so-called  "  unity 
of  place" ;  and  in  most  of  Moliere's  plays,  he  confined 
all  his  acts  to  a  single  and  unchanging  scene. 

It  is  true  that  certain  of  his  earlier  plays,  on  the 
model  of  the  Italian  comedy-of-masks,  were  probably 
performed  in  a  set  representing  a  public  square  with 
houses  (solidly  built  of  wood)  on  each  side,  into  the 
doors  of  which  the  characters  went  and  from  the  win- 
dows of  which  they  could  lean  out.1  This  set  was 
familiar  to  Moliere  and  to  his  audiences,  as  it  was  that 
used  by  the  Italian  comedians  who  played  in  the  same 
theater  on  alternate  nights.  And  thus  we  see  that  we 
need  to  know  the  earlier  Italian  conditions  to  under- 
stand how  it  was  and  why  it  was  that  Moliere  was  able 
1  See  illustration  facing  page  172. 


60  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

to  put  on  the  stage  the  story  of  the  "  School  for  Hus- 
bands"—  which,  as  Voltaire  said,  seems  to  be  all  in 
narrative,  although  it  really  is  all  in  action.  After  a 
while,  Moliere  dispensed  with  the  convenient  devices 
of  the  Italians;  but  his  set  is  always  very  simple,  as 
had  to  be  the  case  when  the  stage  was  encumbered  with 
spectators.  His  characters  always  stand,  except  when 
chairs  are  absolutely  necessary;  and  the  action  is 
adroitly  arranged  so  as  to  be  easily  presented  in  a 
neutral  ground,  the  narrow  space  between  the  specta- 
tors on  the  stage  and  the  painted  drop-scene  which 
hung  at  the  back.  This  is  one  reason  why  his  plays 
can  now  be  performed  in  any  modern  theater.  They 
do  not  need  elaborate  scenery,  although  elaborate 
scenery  can  be  used  without  doing  them  any  harm. 

Moliere  is  in  reality  the  earliest  of  modern  drama- 
tists, since  Shakspere's  conditions  were  at  least  semi- 
medieval.  Shakspere's  courtyard  playhouse  was  un- 
roofed and  lighted  only  by  the  sun,  and  it  had  no 
scenery,  whereas  Moliere's  tennis-court  playhouse  was 
roofed  and  artificially  lighted  and  had  painted  scenery. 
And  Moliere  did  not  always  act  in  a  tennis-court  play- 
house. He  was  allowed  to  move  his  company  into  the 
stately  theater  built  by  Richelieu  on  the  model  de- 
vised by  the  Italian  architects  after  their  study  of  the 
ruins  of  the  Roman  theaters  still  surviving  here  and 
there  in  the  peninsula.1  Palladio  had  even  attempted 
at  Vicenza  what  he  believed  to  be  a  reproduction  of  a 
Roman  theater.  Under  this  Italian  influence,  the  tennis- 
court  playhouse  was  given  up  in  France,  as  the  court- 
yard playhouse  was  given  up  in  England ;  and  every- 
where there  were  erected  theaters  externally  not  unlike 
1  See  frontispiece. 


PLAN   OF  THE  FORTUNE  THEATER, 
LONDON 

A,  front  stage;  B,  back  stage  ;  C,  inner 
stage;  D,  entrance;  E,  courtyard 


PLAN  OF  THE  DRURY  LANE   THEA- 
TER,  LONDON 

A,  back  stage ;  D,  front  stage,  or  apron; 
E,  auditorium  ;  C,  entry 


PLAN   OF  THE  RICHELIEU-MO- 
LIERE   THEATER,  PARIS 

A,  stage;  B,  parterre ;  (7,  seats;  D,  D, 
galleries  ;  E,  E,  E,  entrances 


PLAN  OF  THE  EMPIRE  THEA- 
TER, NEW  YORK 

A, stage;  5,  orchestra  ;  C,  entrance , 
D,  auditorium 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER       61 

our  modern  places  of  amusement,  —  although  in  Paris, 
a  portion  of  the  audience  continued  to  have  seats  on  the 
stage  until  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  century,  — 
and  when  Voltaire's  "Semiramis"  was  produced,  the 
ushers  had  to  beg  these  spectators  to  yield  a  passage 
for  tfye  Ghost  of  Ninus.  As  many  of  these  Italianate 
theaters  were  intended  to  serve  also  for  the  perform- 
ance of  opera  with  its  customary  spectacle,  they  were 
much  larger  than  the  buildings  which  had  been  earlier 
found  satisfactory.  It  was  difficult  to  light  the  stage 
adequately  with  the  sputtering  candles  or  the  feeble 
oil-lamps  which  were  then  the  only  means  of  illumina- 
tion. Probably  this  is  one  reason  why  the  stage  was 
made  to  curve  out  into  the  audience  far  beyond  the 
proscenium-arch  in  which  the  curtain  rose  and  fell.  In 
England,  this  projecting  area  between  the  bow  of  the 
footlights  and  the  line  of  the  curtain  was  called  the 
"apron,"  and  the  best  lighted  central  spot  was  known 
as  the  "focus."  It  became  the  habit  of  the  actors  to 
present  every  important  moment  of  the  piece  out  on 
the  apron,  and  as  near  to  the  focus  as  possible,  because 
it  was  only  there  that  there  was  sufficient  light  to  en- 
able the  spectators  to  perceive  their  play  of  feature. 
This  brought  them  very  close  to  the  audience,  and 
they  actually  turned  their  backs  on  the  spectators  who 
sat  in  the  boxes  nearest  to  the  stage. 

This  was  the  prevailing  type  of  theater  for  two  cen- 
turies after  the  Restoration;  and  there  is  no  better 
example  of  it  than  the  Drury  Lane,  which  Sheridan 
managed  and  for  which  he  wrote  the  "  School  for  Scan- 
dal." *  The  proscenium-arch  was  about  seventy  feet 
wide;  the  stage  was  about  the  same  depth;  and  there 
1  See  illustration  facing  page  192. 


62  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

was  an  apron  of  eighteen  feet  in  front  of  the  curtain. 
The  scenery  was  very  much  what  we  are  still  permitted 
to  see  in  the  present  performance  of  the  earlier  and 
simpler  Italian  operas,  —  that  is  to  say,  there  was  a 
drop-scene  at  the  back,  and  there  were  on  each  side, 
and  parallel  with  the  drop,  five  or  six  "wings,"  repre- 
senting trees  or  columns  or  side  walls.  It  was  through 
the  broad  openings  between  these  wings  that  the  per- 
formers came  out  on  the  stage.  The  place  of  the  action 
could  be  shifted  any  number  of  times  by  merely  push- 
ing out  half-scenes  which  met  in  the  middle  of  the  stage, 
and  by  sliding  back  the  wings  of  the  first  set  and  sliding 
forward  those  of  the  second. 

This  is  the  method  of  presentation  which  allowed 
Sheridan  to  put  two  or  three  different  places  into  a 
single  act  of  the  "School  for  Scandal"  and  to  display 
his  characters  first  at  Lady  Sneerwell's  and  then  at 
Lady  Teazle's.  It  was  the  only  method  known  to 
Shakspere's  earliest  editors,  from  Rowe  and  Theobald 
down;  and  in  their  ignorance  of  the  more  primitive 
Elizabethan  theater,  they  assumed,  naturally  enough, 
that  this  was  the  method  employed  by  Shakspere ;  and 
so  they  divided  the  text  of  his  plays  into  acts  and  scenes, 
whenever  they  thought  they  could  detect  any  indica- 
tion of  a  change  of  place.  This  division  into  acts  and 
scenes  conveys  a  wholly  false  impression  of  Shakspere's 
real  method.  He  conceived  his  play  as  a  story  told  in 
action  in  a  series  of  dialogues,  many  of  which  were  held 
on  the  neutral  ground  that  might  be  anywhere.  Only 
where  there  was  an  advantage  to  be  gained  by  particu- 
larizing the  exact  spot  where  the  action  lay,  did  Shak- 
spere take  trouble  to  indicate  it;  and  we  may  be  sure 
that  nothing  was  further  from  his  thought  than  that 


THE   INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER      63 

his  story  should  be  cut  up  into  the  snippets  of  scenes 
that  we  find  in  the  ordinary  library  editions  of  his 
plays. 

v 

T6ward  the  end  of  the  two  hundred  years  which 
extended  from  the  Restoration  to  the  middle  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  the  conditions  of  performance 
began  to  change.  The  art  of  the  scene-painter  became 
more  elaborate;  and  the  box-set  was  devised,  whereby 
a  room  could  be  shown  with  its  walls  and  its  ceiling. 
The  influence  of  the  realistic  movement  of  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century  imposed  on  the  stage- 
manager  the  duty  of  making  every  scene  character- 
istic of  the  period  and  of  the  people,  and  of  relating 
the  characters  closely  to  their  environment.  The  facil- 
ities for  lighting  were  greatly  improved,  first  by  the 
introduction  of  gas,  then  by  the  invention  of  the  lime- 
light, and  finally  by  the  perfecting  of  the  electric  light. 
It  was  found  to  be  possible  to  illuminate  the  stage  so 
as  to  show  the  expression  on  the  actors'  faces,  even  in 
the  remoter  corners  of  the  stage.  The  apron  behind 
the  curving  footlights  was  no  longer  necessary  or  even 
useful;  and  the  stage  was  therefore  cut  back  to  the 
proscenium-arch,  which  became  a  frame  for  the  stage- 
opening.  Sir  Hubert  Herkomer  declared  the  modern 
practice  when  he  asserted  that  "  the  proscenium  should 
be  to  the  stage-picture  what  the  frame  is  to  the  easel- 
picture;  it  should  separate  the  stage-picture  from  the 
surroundings,  just  as  a  painted  picture  should  reach 
the  frame." 

It  is  for  this  picture-frame  stage  that  every  dramatist 
of  to-day  is  composing  his  plays ;  and  his  methods  are 
of  necessity  those  of  the  picture-frame  stage;  just  as 


64  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  methods  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatic  poet  were  of 
necessity  those  of  the  platform-stage.  Probably  we 
have  not  yet  seen  all  the  consequences  of  this  striking 
change  in  the  physical  conditions  of  the  theater;  and 
probably  we  have  not  yet  seized  the  full  significance 
of  the  transformation.  For  example,  as  the  actor  is  no 
longer  partly  surrounded  by  the  audience,  as  the  per- 
formers are  now  withdrawn  beyond  a  magic  line  of 
separation,  the  drama  is  certain  hereafter  to  be  less 
oratorical,  less  rhetorical,  less  bombastic;  it  is  bound 
to  be  simpler  in  its  language,  more  "natural."  The 
long  soliloquy,  the  confidential  self-revelation,  which 
was  not  out  of  place  on  the  platform-stage,  when  a 
character  was  on  the  neutral  ground  that  might  be 
anywhere,  and  when  he  was  so  close  to  some  of  the 
spectators  that  he  could  put  out  his  hand  to  touch 
them,  —  this  is  obviously  inappropriate  now  when  the 
actor  is  remote  behind  the  proscenium,  and  seated  on 
a  real  chair  in  what  looks  like  a  real  room. 

The  assertion  has  been  made  that  the  relinquishing 
of  the  soliloquy  is  to  be  ascribed  to  the  influence  of 
Ibsen;  and  it  may  be  admitted  that  the  Norwegian 
dramatist  has  been  masterly  in  his  adjustment  of  his 
methods  to  the  conditions  of  the  picture-frame  stage. 
But  we  can  shift  the  real  responsibility  for  the  banish- 
ing of  the  soliloquy  a  little  further  back ;  it  does  not  lie 
on  Ibsen's  shoulders,  but  on  Edison's,  —  since  it  was 
an  inevitable  consequence  of  the  incandescent  bulb. 
Here  we  find  the  confirmation  of  a  remark  made  by 
Ludovic  Celler  in  his  account  of  stage-conditions  in 
France  in  the  seventeenth  century:  "Artificial  light 
creates  a  realm  of  convention,  where  an  imitation  is 
more  easily  accepted  and  where  the  eyes  are  less  exact- 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER       65 

ing ;  a  compromise  is  attained  between  fact  and  fiction ; 
and  artificial  light  is  what  has  most  contributed  to  the 
progress  of  theatrical  representation." 

Upon  the  picture-frame  stage  of  the  twentieth 
century,  it  is  now  possible  to  present,  without  any  al- 
teration or  transposition,  the  tragedies  of  Sophocles, 
composed  in  accordance  with  the  conditions  of  the 
immense  open-air  theater  of  Athens,  and  also  the 
comedies  of  Moliere,  composed  in  accordance  with 
the  conditions  of  the  tennis-court  playhouse  of  Paris. 
But  the  plays  of  Shakspere  and  of  Sheridan  can  be  put 
on  this  picture-frame  stage  of  ours  only  after  they  have 
been  rearranged,  because  Shakspere's  were  composed 
in  accordance  with  the  wholly  different  and  absolutely 
incompatible  conditions  of  the  courtyard  theater,  and 
Sheridan's  in  accordance  with  the  conditions  of  the 
post-Restoration  playhouse.  The  picture-frame  stage 
may  be  superior  to  its  several  predecessors,  or  it  may  be 
inferior  to  them,  but  it  is  at  all  events  different  from 
them;  and  it  is  the  stage  to  which  we  are  nowadays 
accustomed.  If  Shakspere  and  Sheridan  were  writing 
plays  to-day,  it  is  the  picture-frame  stage  that  they 
would  write  for ;  and  we  should  find  them  so  arranging 
the  episodes  of  their  stories  that  these  could  be  pre- 
sented with  only  a  single  set  in  each  act,  since  the  elabo- 
ration of  our  modern  scenery  makes  it  disadvantageous 
to  attempt  a  change  of  place  during  the  act.  This  is  a 
technical  difficulty  to  be  vanquished,  which  could  not 
fail  to  affect  their  method  of  treatment,  and  even  to 
some  extent  their  choice  of  theme.  The  technical  pos- 
sibilities of  any  art  at  any  moment  must  more  or  less 
determine  and  may  more  or  less  limit,  not  only  how  the 
artist  shall  express  what  he  has  to  say,  but  also  what 


66  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

he  shall  attempt  to  express.  And  it  is  only  after  we 
have  analyzed  these  technical  possibilities  that  we 
are  really  prepared  to  appreciate  what  the  artist  has 
actually  accomplished. 

Attention  must  be  called  also  to  one  other  point,  — 
to  the  fact  that  since  the  scene-painters  have  gained 
the  skill  needful  for  the  satisfactory  and  more  or  less 
realistic  representation  of  interiors  and  of  exteriors, 
and  especially  since  the  invention  of  the  electric  light 
has  made  it  possible  to  illuminate  every  corner  of  the 
stage  on  which  these  interiors  and  exteriors  are  set,  the 
conditions  of  performance  are  now  very  similar  through- 
out the  civilized  world,  differing  only  in  minor  and 
unimportant  details.  A  modern  theater  in  Paris  or  in 
London  is  structurally  very  similar  to  a  modern  theater 
in  New  York  or  Melbourne,  in  Budapest  or  Buenos 
Ayres.  This  standardizing  of  the  playhouse  is  a  new 
thing  in  the  history  of  the  drama.  There  may  have 
been  a  general  resemblance  between  the  conditions 
under  which  Shakspere  worked  and  those  under  which 
Lope  de  Vega  worked;  but  these  early  English  and 
Spanish  conditions  are  wholly  unlike  those  of  the 
Greek  theater,  of  the  Roman  theater,  of  the  French 
theater  of  Moliere's  time,  and  of  the  English  theater 
of  Sheridan's  day,  which  all  varied  widely  from  one 
another.  Now  at  last,  out  of  all  these  contending  tradi- 
tions there  has  been  evolved  the  type  of  theater  best 
suited  to  the  circumstances  of  .our  modern  civiliza- 
tion ;  and  the  plays  written  to-day  in  any  one  of  the 
modern  languages  can  be  transported  anywhere  and 
translated  for  performance  without  any  structural 
modification. 

The  world-wide  uniformity  of  theatrical  conditions 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  THEATER       67 

has  brought  with  it  a  substantial  identity  of  drama- 
turgic method.  In  its  framework,  a  French  play  is  now 
closely  akin  to  a  German  play,  an  Italian  play  to  an 
American.  And  as  a  result,  the  modern  dramatist  is 
enabled  to  make  a  cosmopolitan  appeal,  not  possible 
to  any  of  his  predecessors  in  any  of  the  earlier  periods 
when  the  drama  has  most  abundantly  flourished.  The 
plays  of  Ibsen,  of  Rostand,  of  d'Annunzio,  and  of 
Echegaray  have  passports  permitting  them  to  go  any- 
where and  everywhere.  The  method  of  any  one  of 
these  dramatists  is  fundamentally  the  method  of  every 
other,  however  national  and  individual  may  be  his 
material.  And  it  is  curious  to  note  that  this  acceptance 
of  a  cosmopolitan  form  has  been  accompanied  by  a 
deeper  appreciation  of  local  color,  of  racial  types  of 
character,  and  of  themes  peculiar  to  the  several  races. 
The  form  is  cosmopolitan,  but  the  content  is  increas- 
ingly national.  Ibsen  is  intensely  Scandinavian;  Verga 
is  immitigably  Italian;  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  and  Mr. 
Henry  Arthur  Jones  are  rigorously  British;  Mr.  Au- 
gustus Thomas  and  Mr.  Clyde  Fitch  are  thoroughly 
American ;  and  yet  each  of  them,  whatever  his  stock, 
has  built  his  plays  in  accord  with  the  same  interna- 
tional formula,  the  only  formula  which  is  really  satis- 
factory in  our  uniform  theaters. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE    INFLUENCE   OF  THE   AUDIENCE 

Shakspere,  we  know,  was  a  popular  playwright.  I  mean  not 
only  that  many  of  his  plays  were  favorites  in  his  day,  but  that  he 
wrote,  mainly  at  least,  for  the  more  popular  kind  of  audience,  and 
that  within  certain  limits,  he  conformed  to  its  tastes.  —  A.  C.  BRAD- 
LEY, Oxford  Lectures  on  Poetry. 


THE  shape  of  the  special  theater  for  which  a  dramatist 
has  composed  his  plays,  its  size,  its  scenery,  and  its 
lighting,  all  exert  an  influence  upon  the  playwright 
and  combine  to  condition  the  form  which  his  work 
must  take,  even  if  they  do  not  more  or  less  modify  its 
content  also.  But  the  strongest  pressure  upon  the  con- 
tent of  the  drama  of  any  special  period  and  of  any 
special  place  is  that  of  the  contemporary  audience  for 
whose  delight  it  was  originally  devised.  How  any  au- 
thor at  any  time  can  tell  his  story  upon  the  stage  de- 
pends upon  the  kind  of  stage  he  has  in  view ;  but  what 
kind  of  story  he  may  tell  depends  upon  the  kind  of 
people  he  wants  to  interest.  As  Dry  den  declared  in  one 
of  his  epilogues :  — 

"They  who  have  best  succeeded  on  the  stage 
Have  still  conformed  their  genius  to  the  age." 

And  this  couplet  of  Dryden's  recalls  the  later  lines  of 
Johnson : — 

"The  drama's  laws  the  drama's  patrons  give, 
And  we  who  live  to  please,  must  please  to  live." 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE      69 

In  other  words,  the  dramatic  poet  is  not  independent 
of  his  audience,  as  the  lyric  poets  may  be,  since  he  can 
never  be  satisfied  with  mere  self-expression.  His  work 
depends  for  its  effect  upon  his  hearers,  and  he  has  to 
take  them  into  account,  under  penalty  of  blank  failure. 
He  must  give  them  what  they  want,  even  if  he  gives 
them  also  what  he  wants.  The  author  of  a  drama 
cannot  labor  for  himself  alone;  he  has  to  admit  the 
spectators  as  his  special  partners.  There  is  ever  a  tacit 
agreement,  a  quasi-contract  between  the  playwright 
and  the  playgoers.  As  the  ingenious  and  ingenuous 
Abbe  d'Aubignac  asserted,  more  than  two  centuries 
ago,  when  he  was  laying  down  laws  for  the  drama: 
"  We  are  not  to  forget  here  (and  I  think  it  one  of  the 
best  Observations  I  have  made  upon  this  matter)  that 
if  the  subject  is  not  conformable  to  the  Manners  as  well 
as  the  Opinions  of  the  spectators,  it  will  never  take." 
And  a  later  remark  of  his  proved  that  he  possessed  the 
prime  requisite  of  a  dramatic  critic,  in  that  he  had 
worked  out  his  principles  not  merely  in  the  library  but 
also  in  the  theater  itself :  "  For  if  there  be  any  Act 
or  Scene  that  has  not  that  conformity  to  the  Manners 
of  the  spectators,  you  will  suddenly  see  the  applause 
cease,  and  in  its  place  a  discontent  succeed,  though 
they  themselves  do  not  know  the  cause  of  it." 

Just  as  the  theater  for  which  Sophocles  wrote  dif- 
fered in  almost  every  way  from  the  theater  for  which 
Shakspere  wrote,  so  the  audience  that  the  Greek  poet 
had  to  please,  if  he  was  to  win  the  awarded  prize,  was 
very  unlike  the  audience  that  the  English  poet  had  to 
please,  if  he  was  to  make  his  living  as  a  professional 
playwright.  There  is  not  a  wider  difference  between 
the  theaters  of  Louis  XIV's  time,  wherein  Moliere's 


70  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

comedies  were  first  produced,  and  the  cosmopolitan 
modern  playhouses  wherein  Ibsen's  dramas  are  per- 
formed, than  there  is  between  the  burghers  of  Paris, 
whom  the  French  humorist  had  to  amuse,  and  the 
narrow-minded  villagers  of  Grimstad,  whom  Ibsen 
had  always  before  him  as  the  individual  spectators 
he  wished  to  startle  out  of  their  moral  lethargy. 

Even  though  the  playwright  has  ever  to  consider  the 
playgoers,  their  opinions  and  their  prejudices,  he  is 
under  no  undue  strain  when  he  does  this ;  and  the  most 
of  his  effort  is  unconscious,  since  he  is  always  his  own 
contemporary,  sharing  in  the  likes  and  dislikes  of  his 
fellow-countrymen,  the  very  men  whom  he  hopes  to 
see  flocking  to  the  performance  of  his  plays.  Sophocles 
did  not  need  to  take  thought  to  avoid  what  would  be 
displeasing  to  the  thousands  who  sat  around  the  hol- 
low slope  of  the  Acropolis ;  he  was  an  Athenian  him- 
self;  and  yet,  no  doubt,  he  acted  always  on  the  advice 
Isocrates  used  to  give  to  his  pupils  in  oratory,  who 
were  told  to  "study  the  people."  Shakspere  did  not 
have  to  hold  himself  in  for  fear  of  shocking  the  en- 
ergetic Elizabethans;  he  was  himself  a  subject  of  the 
Virgin  Queen,  one  of  the  plain  people,  with  an  instinc- 
tive understanding  of  the  desires  of  the  playgoers  of  his 
age.  As  M.  Jusserand  has  acutely  asserted,  the  Eng- 
lish playgoing  public  of  Shakspere's  time  demanded 
"  nourishment  suited  to  its  tastes,  which  were  spon- 
taneous and  natural;  it  imposed  these  on  the  play- 
makers  ;  it  loved,  like  all  peoples,  to  see  on  the  stage, 
made  more  beautiful  or  more  ugly,  that  is  to  say,  more 
highly  colored,  what  it  found  in  itself  embryonically, 
what  it  felt  and  could  not  express,  what  it  could  do  and 
yet  knew  not  how  to  narrate." 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE      71 

Mofiere  was  able  to  choose  themes  to  interest  his 
contemporaries  because  he  was  himself  a  Frenchman, 
sympathizing  with  the  sentiments  of  his  time  and 
governed  by  the  same  heredity  as  the  spectators  of  his 
plays.  He  is  himself  the  superb  example  of  the  truth 
of  Nisard's  assertion  that  "  in  France  the  man  of  genius 
is  he  who  says  what  everybody  knows ;  he  is  only  the 
intelligent  echo  of  the  crowd ;  and  if  he  does  not  wish 
to  find  us  deaf  and  indifferent,  he  must  not  astonish 
us  with  his  personal  views  —  he  must  reveal  us  to  our- 
selves." And  as  Moliere  is  the  type  of  the  urban  and 
urbane  French  dramatic  poet,  guided  by  the  social 
instinct,  ever  dominant  in  France,  so  is  Ibsen  rather 
a  rural  type  forever  preaching  individualism  to  the 
dwellers  in  the  tiny  seashore  village  where  he  spent  his 
youth,  and  giving  little  thought  to  the  inhabitants  of 
the  larger  world  where  he  had  lived  since  his  maturity. 
Although  cosmopolitan  audiences  have  appreciated 
Ibsen's  power  and  skill,  it  was  not  for  cosmopolitan 
audiences  that  he  wrote  his  social  dramas,  but  for  the 
old  folks  at  home  in  Norway,  whom  he  wanted  to 
awaken  morally  and  mentally.  And  here,  in  his  mem- 
ory of  the  feelings  and  of  the  failings  of  the  men  and 
women  among  whom  he  grew  to  manhood,  we  can 
find  the  obvious  explanation  of  that  narrow  parochial- 
ism which  is  sometimes  revealed  most  unexpectedly 
in  one  or  another  of  his  plays. 

ii 

A  certain  knowledge  of  the  people  to  whom  the  play- 
wright belonged,  and  for  whom  he  wrote,  is  a  condition 
precedent  to  any  real  understanding  of  his  plays.  And, 
on  the  other  hand,  a  study  of  the  drama  of  any  period 


72  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

or  of  any  place  cannot  fail  to  supply  interesting  in- 
formation about  the  manners  and  customs,  the  modes 
of  thought,  and  the  states  of  feeling  of  the  people  of  that 
country  at  that  time.  For  example,  the  medieval  drama 
seems  to  have  had  its  earliest  development  in  France, 
and  perhaps  for  this  reason  one  mystery  is  very  like 
another  mystery  all  over  Europe,  whether  it  is  French 
or  English,  Italian  or  German;  but  one  of  the  varia- 
tions from  this  monotony  is  to  be  found  in  the  scene 
between  Joseph  and  Potiphar's  wife,  which  the  Eng- 
lish redactors  treated  in  outline  only  or  omitted  alto- 
gether, but  which  the  French  compilers  elaborately 
amplified  for  the  greater  joy  of  their  compatriots.  To 
this  day  the  French  are  willing  to  laugh  loudly  at  the 
humorous  side  of  conjugal  infidelity,  whereas,  we  who 
speak  English  are  unwilling  to  take  this  other  than 
seriously.  Here  we  can  see  reason  why  many  a  skittish 
farce,  which  has  amused  thousands  in  Paris,  has  failed 
to  please  in  New  York  and  in  London. 

The  lack  of  popular  appreciation  about  which  Ter- 
ence often  complained  bitterly  was  due  to  his  incom- 
patibility with  the  only  audiences  which  Rome  then 
knew.  He  proportioned  his  intrigues  and  polished  his 
dialogue  when  his  spectators  were  accustomed  to 
coarse  buffoonery.  Terence  was  born  out  of  his  time; 
and  he  might  have  been  a  really  successful  writer  of 
comedies  had  he  lived  in  the  Italian  Renascence,  when 
he  could  hope  for  an  audience  of  scholars  swift  to 
enjoy  his  delicate  finish  and  his  delightful  felicity  of 
phrase.  As  it  was,  Terence,  refusing  to  gratify  the 
tastes  of  the  populace  of  his  own  time,  had  to  confess 
failure.  The  more  practical  Lope  de  Vega  accepted 
the  audiences  of  his  day  for  what  they  were,  less  vio- 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE      73 

/ 

lent  than  Terence's,  but  quite  as  robust  and  wilful  as 
Sliakspere's ;  and  the  Spanish  playwright  made  the 
best  of  the  situation,  disclosing  his  marvelous  inven- 
tiveness and  his  splendid  productivity  in  countless 
pieces  of  the  widest  variety.  In  his  apologetic  poem 
on  the  "  New  Art  of  Making  Plays, "  he  pretended  that 
he  composed  these  pieces  against  his  own  better  know- 
ledge of  the  so-called  "  rules  of  the  drama,"  and  that 
before  he  sat  down  to  write,  he  was  careful  to  put  Ter- 
ence and  Plautus  out  of  the  room;  but  he  was  prob- 
ably too  completely  his  own  contemporary,  too  much 
a  man  of  his  time  and  of  his  race,  to  have  been  forced 
to  any  great  sacrifices  of  his  artistic  code.  In  reality, 
he  seems  to  have  felt  no  awkward  restraint  as  a  result 
of  his  desire  to  please  his  public;  and  apparently  he 
was  able  to  express  himself  freely  and  fully  in  his  plays, 
even  if  he  also  took  care  to  have  them  conform  to  the 
likings  of  the  populace  of  Madrid.  So  Shakspere  was 
careful  to  have  his  plays  conform  to  the  likings  of  the 
populace  of  London ;  and  he  also  was  able  to  use  his 
dramas  for  the  amplest  self-expression.  Here  we  may 
observe  once  more  that  the  true  artist  unhesitatingly 
accepts  the  conditions  imposed  on  him,  whatever  they 
may  be,  and  that  he  is  often  able  to  turn  the  stumbling- 
block  in  his  path  into  a  stepping-stone  to  higher  things. 
Even  if  a  Greek  dramatic  poet  could  by  his  pro- 
phetic power  have  foreseen  the  potency  of  modern  ro- 
mantic love,  he  could  never  have  dared  a  "  Romeo  and 
Juliet,"  because  the  contemporary  spectators  would 
have  failed  to  understand  the  swift  and  sudden  emo- 
tion which  is  its  mainspring.  And,  on  the  other  hand, 
the  Greek  dramatic  poets  dealt  with  many  a  motive 
with  which  the  modern  audience  can  have  no  sym- 


74  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

pathy.  For  us  the  beautiful  pathos  of  the  "Alcestis" 
of  Euripides  is  spoilt  by  the  contemptible  alacrity 
with  which  the  husband  allows  his  devoted  wife  to  die 
for  him,  although  his  conduct  did  not  seem  at  all  repre- 
hensible to  the  Greeks,  who  held  so  exalted  an  opinion 
of  the  value  of  the  young  male  citizen  to  the  state,  that 
they  saw  no  impropriety  in  his  accepting  his  wife's 
lovely  sacrifice  of  herself.  The  "Antigone"  of  Sopho- 
cles turns  also  on  a  Greek  sentiment  very  remote  from 
our  modern  feeling,  a  sentiment  which  has  to  be  ex- 
plained to  us  before  we  can  grasp  its  significance  or 
understand  its  importance  to  the  noble  heroine.  And 
again,  in  the  "  Medea"  of  Euripides,  the  wrathful  hero- 
ine's slaughter  of  her  children  to  revenge  herself  for 
their  father's  abject  desertion  of  her  seems  to  us  un- 
endurably  repugnant. 

At  the  period  when  the  Homeric  poems  were  com- 
posed, there  still  survived  among  the  Greeks  a  belief 
that  the  sacrifice  of  a  virgin  before  a  fleet  set  sail  would 
bring  favorable  winds.  At  the  period  when  the  Attic 
tragedies  were  written,  this  superstition  had  probably 
passed  away;  but  the  memory  of  it  lingered.  The 
Athenian  spectators  who  sat  in  the  theater  of  Dionysus 
were  well  aware  that  their  ancestors  had  held  this  belief; 
and  therefore  they  were  not  unwilling  to  accept  the 
legend  of  Iphigenia,  when  it  was  presented  in  a  play 
by  Euripides.  But  we  moderns  can  have  no  sympathy 
with  a  superstition  like  this ;  and  we  do  not  easily  un- 
derstand how  it  could  ever  have  been  accepted.  And 
as  a  result,  Racine  and  others  have  wasted  their  efforts 
trying  to  interest  us  in  a  subject  which  is  to  us  incon- 
ceivable, not  to  say,  abhorrent. 

Shakspere   may  not  himself  have  had   any  belief 


INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE      75 

either  in  witches  or  in  ghosts,  but  he  knew  that  his  con- 
temporaries had  no  doubt  about  these  weird  creatures 
and  these  spectral  beings.  And  he  had  therefore  no 
hesitation  in  making  effective  use  of  them  whenever 
occasion  served.  No  modern  dramatist  dealing  with  a 
modern  theme  would  dare  to  invoke  the  aid  of  a  ghost 
or  of  a  witch,  because  the  belief  in  them  is  no  longer 
a  common  possession  of  his  contemporaries.  Nowa- 
days, we  may  be  willing  to  accept  stranger  things,  — 
telepathy,  for  example,  mental  healing,  and  the  like; 
but  we  are  not  willing  to  believe  that  the  slaying  of  a 
maiden  will  have  any  influence  upon  the  storms  of  the 
sea,  or  that  a  sheeted  ghost  will  walk  the  earth  to  bid 
his  son  avenge  his  taking  off  or  to  fright  his  murderer 
with  his  gory  locks. 

It  would  not  be  difficult  to  adduce  examples  of  the 
effect  exerted  on  the  dramatist,  not  by  the  lapse  of  time, 
but  by  the  change  of  country,  by  the  divergence  of 
racial  points  of  view  even  in  the  same  period.  For 
instance,  in  Sudermann's  strong  drama,  "Heimat," 
known  to  us  by  the  name  of  the  heroine  Magda,  the 
unbending  rigor  of  the  aged  father  and  his  violent 
harshness  are  almost  repulsive  to  us  in  America,  where 
we  are  not  accustomed  to  yield  so  blind  a  deference  to 
the  head  of  the  family  as  the  old  colonel  insists  upon 
in  Germany.  But  there  is  no  need  to  multiply  these 
examples,  since  we  all  know  the  divergent  attitudes  of 
different  peoples  toward  the  social  organization.  In 
this  divergence  we  can  find  the  explanation  why  more 
than  one  excellent  play  is  little  known  outside  the  land 
of  its  birth.  The  finest  of  French  comedies  of  the 
nineteenth  century  is  the  "Gendre  de  M.  Poirier"  of 
Augier  and  Sandeau ;  and  although  it  has  been  trans- 


76  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

lated  into  English  or  adapted  more  than  once,  it  has 
failed  to  interest  our  audiences,  because  it  is  funda- 
mentally French  both  in  theme  and  in  treatment.  Its 
appeal  is  fundamentally  local ;  and  the  veracity  of  its 
interpretation  of  characters  essentially  French  has  pre- 
vented its  acceptance  in  Great  Britain  and  the  United 
States.  The  more  truthfully  a  dramatist  reproduces 
the  life  about  him,  the  more  sincerely  he  presents  the 
special  types  his  countrymen  will  most  surely  appre- 
ciate, the  more  he  subordinates  plot  and  situation  to 
the  revelation  of  character,  the  less  likely  he  is  to  see  his 
plays  successful  outside  of  his  own  language.  The 
ingenious  complications  of  the  inventive  Scribe,  in 
which  the  characters  were  only  puppets  in  the  hands 
of  the  playwright,  were  performed  all  over  the  world, 
while  the  rich  and  solid  comedies  of  Augier  have  rarely 
been  exported  beyond  the  boundaries  of  France. 

There  are  striking  differences  to  be  observed  even 
between  the  playgoers  of  two  countries  speaking  the 
same  language  and  inheriting  the  same  social  opinions ; 
such  differences  are  discoverable  sometimes  between 
the  audiences  of  London  and  the  audiences  of  New 
York.  For  example,  in  Bronson  Howard's  "  Banker's 
Daughter,"  the  young  artist  to  whom  the  heroine  is 
engaged  when  the  piece  begins  and  whom  she  thinks 
she  then  loves,  even  when  she  marries  another  man  to 
save  her  father,  has  to  be  eliminated  in  the  course  of 
the  action,  so  that  she  may  find  herself  absolutely  free 
to  give  her  true  love  to  her  devoted  husband.  There- 
fore, one  act  took  place  in  Paris,  and  a  noted  French 
swordsman  was  introduced  to  force  a  quarrel  on  the 
young  painter  and  to  kill  him  in  a  duel.  Although  the 
duel  is  no  longer  possible  in  the  United  States,  Ameri- 


TllE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE      77 

can  audiences  know  that  it  still  exists  in  France,  and 
we  are  familiar  with  the  feud  of  the  southwest  and 
with  the  street-shooting  of  the  mining-camps.  But 
when  Bronson  Howard's  play  was  adapted  for  London, 
with  its  characters  localized  as  British  subjects,  his 
London  collaborator  protested  against  the  duel,  on  the 
ground  that  a  British  audience  would  not  accept  it. 
If  the  young  artist  was  to  become  an  Englishman,  then 
he  would  laugh  at  the  suggestion  of  crossing  swords. 
So  the  artist  ceased  to  be,  and  in  his  stead  there  was  a 
young  soldier;  and  the  act  in  Paris  took  place  at  the 
British  embassy,  where  the  officer  had  to  appear  in 
uniform.  There  the  French  swordsman  insulted  him 
and  his  uniform,  and  in  his  person  the  whole  army  of 
the  Queen,  until  the  British  spectators  fairly  longed 
to  see  the  Englishman  knock  the  Frenchman  down. 
And  when  the  stalwart  young  fellow  was  goaded  at  last 
to  this  violence,  the  London  audience  could  not  there- 
after object  to  his  giving  to  the  French  swordsman 
"  the  satisfaction  of  a  gentleman." 

This  shows  the  difference  between  the  two  audiences 
speaking  the  same  language;  and  another  illustration 
will  serve  to  show  the  difference  that  may  exist  between 
two  audiences  in  contrasting  quarters  of  the  same 
American  city.  When  Mr.  Clyde  Fitch's  "Barbara 
Frietchie"  was  produced  at  the  Criterion  Theater  in 
New  York  (where  the  best  seats  sold  for  two  dollars) , 
the  Southern  heroine,  in  her  quarrel  with  her  Northern 
lover,  tore  the  stars-and-stripes  into  tatters,  only  to 
sew  the  flag  together  later  that  she  might  be  shot  be- 
neath its  folds.  But  when  this  play  was  taken  to  the 
Academy  of  Music  (where  the  best  seats  sold  for  fifty 
cents),  the  heroine  was  no  longer  allowed  to  destroy 


78  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  national  flag,  for  fear  that  an  act  so  unpatriotic 
would  forever  alienate  from  her  the  sympathy  of  the 
spectators  in  that  popular  playhouse.  This  anecdote 
is  not  well  vouched  for  and  it  may  not  be  a  fact ;  but 
perhaps  it  is  quite  as  significant  even  if  it  chances  to 
be  only  an  invention. 

These  may  seem  but  trifles,  after  all ;  and  no  doubt 
they  are.  But  they  serve  to  make  clear  how  dependent 
the  dramatist  is  upon  the  unreflective  sympathy  of  the 
spectator.  This  the  practical  playwrights  of  every 
e[Jbch  and  of  every  clime  have  always  felt.  Sometimes 
they  have  been  tempted  to  take  advantage  of  it  un- 
worthily by  crude  appeals  to  the  prejudices  of  the  play- 
goers they  were  seeking  to  please ;  sometimes  they  have 
even  descended  to  overt  claptrap.  On  occasion,  they 
have  not  been  ashamed  to  bring  in  the  national  flag  to 
capture  unthinking  applause.  Some  of  them  have  not 
hesitated  to  seize  every  opportunity  to  praise  their  own 
country  and  to  contrast  their  own  countrymen  favor- 
ably with  foreigners.  In  French  plays,  the  British  and 
the  Americans  are  almost  unfailing  subjects  for  satire 
and  for  caricature ;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  the  French- 
man has  been  a  butt  in  countless  comedies  in  the 
English  language. 

Even  the  foremost  of  dramatic  poets  have  now  and 
again  been  glad  to  voice  eloquently  their  own  patriotic 
sentiments,  certain  that  these  would  prove  welcome  to 
their  audiences.  Shakspere,  for  example,  let  slip  no 
opportunity  to  praise  England,  precious  stone  set  in  the 
silver  sea ;  and  he  was  so  subdued  to  what  he  worked  in 
that  he  revealed  no  insight  into  the  nobility  of  Jeanne 
d'Arc.  Euripides,  so  Professor  MahafFy  has  pointed 
out,  was  prone  to  make  his  Athenian  heroes  paragons 


\ 
THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE      79 

of  perfection,  while  going  out  of  his  way  to  blacken  the 
legendary  heroes  of  rival  cities  like  Sparta  and  Thebes. 
And  in  his  "Medea,"  the  same  dramatic  poet  seized 
a  very  slim  excuse  to  insert  a  superb  choral  ode  to  the 
glory  of  Athens. 

in 

These  are  merely  more  or  less  unfortunate  illustra- 
tions of  the  inevitable  dependence  of  the  dramatist 
upon  the  spectators  whose  sympathy  he  must  capture 
and  whose  interest  he  must  awaken.  A  play  must 
please  the  people  for  whom  it  is  composed ;  and  if,  for 
any  reason,  it  is  unable  to  do  this,  then  it  has  missed 
its  mark.  The  final  verdict  has  been  rendered;  and 
there  is  no  hope  of  moving  for  a  new  trial.  And  it 
must  please  the  whole  people,  the  crowd  at  large,  for 
the  strength  of  the  drama  lies  in  the  breadth  of  its 
appeal.  It  misses  its  purpose  unless  it  has  something 
for  all,  —  for  young  and  old,  for  rich  and  poor,  for  men 
and  women,  for  the  educated  and  for  the  uneducated. 
More  than  any  other  literary  form,  it  has  preserved 
the  communal  quality  which  characterizes  all  primitive 
poetry.  Of  all  the  arts,  the  drama  is  essentially  the 
most  democratic,  for  it  cannot  exist  without  the  multi- 
tude. It  has  been  called  "  a  function  of  the  crowd." 
It  cannot  hope  for  success  when  it  seeks  to  attract  only 
a  caste,  a  coterie,  a  clique;  it  must  be  the  art  of  the 
people  as  a  whole,  with  all  their  divergencies  of  culti- 
vation. And  this  it  has  been  whenever  it  achieved  its 
noblest  triumphs,  —  in  Greece,  when  Sophocles  and 
Euripides  followed  ^Eschylus ;  in  England,  when  Shak- 
spere  succeeded  Marlowe;  in  Spain,  when  Lope  de 
Vega  and  Calderon  worked  side  by  side;  and  in  France, 


80  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

when  Moliere  came  as  a  connecting  link  between 
Corneille  and  Racine. 

Any  attempt  to  organize  the  drama  on  an  aristocratic 
basis  is  foredoomed  to  failure ;  and  every  effort  to  make 
it  independent  of  the  average  man  has  resulted  in 
sterility.  Just  as  it  is  unfortunate  for  dramatic  litera- 
ture that  poets  have  sometimes  been  unwilling  to 
master  the  form  which  was  suited  to  the  theater  of 
their  own  times,  and  have  let  themselves  lazily  de- 
scend to  the  lower  level  of  the  so-called  "closet- 
drama,"  so  it  would  be  unfortunate  also  if  they  had 
the  privilege  of  composing  their  plays  for  a  theater  set 
apart  from  the  plain  people,  appealing  only  to  the 
dilettants,  and  independent  of  the  takings  of  the  door. 
It  is  good  for  every  man,  even  if  he  is  truly  a  poet,  and 
especially  if  he  is  truly  a  poet,  that  he  should  go  down 
into  the  arena  and  meet  his  fellow-men  face  to  face. 
There  is  mischief  in  any  attempt  to  found  an  endowed 
theater  which  shall  not  rely  for  the  major  part  of  its 
support  upon  the  public  as  a  whole. 

This  is  an  experiment  which  has  been  tried  more 
than  once,  notably  when  Goethe  had  sole  control  of 
the  court-theater  at  Weimar.  He  chose  the  plays ;  he 
trained  the  actors;  he  was  the  autocrat  even  of  the 
audience,  for  when  the  students  from  Jena  expressed 
their  feelings,  he  rebuked  them  with  an  Olympian  frown 
until  they  ceased  coming.  And  the  result  was  what 
might  be  expected.  Of  the  plays  which  were  prepared 
specially  for  the  Weimar  theater,  only  those  written  by 
that  born  dramatist,  Schiller,  have  kept  the  stage. 
And  Goethe  himself,  in  his  old  age,  seems  to  have  seen 
the  futility  of  his  efforts,  for  he  told  Eckermann  that 
"nothing  is  more  dangerous  to  the  well-being  of  a 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE   81 

theater  than  when  the  director  is  so  placed  that  a 
greater  or  less  receipt  at  the  treasury  does  not  affect 
him  personally."  Probably  Goethe  would  have  ad- 
mitted without  hesitation  that  the  theater  is  a  function 
of  the  crowd.  The  drama  is  not  for  the  selfish  delight 
of  the  poet  alone,  who  must  never  neglect  his  duty  of 
revealing  the  people  to  themselves. 

The  Corned ie  -  Francaise  is  not  supported  by  the 
French  government ;  it  is  only  helped  out  by  the  gift 
of  the  theater  itself  rent-free  and  by  a  subsidy  which 
makes  possible  a  proper  pension-fund  and  which  frees 
the  manager  from  any  temptation  to  produce  the  coarser 
types  of  popular  melodrama.  It  has  to  reckon  with  the 
people  and  it  depends  for  its  prosperity  upon  the  sale 
of  its  seats.  This  is  the  case  also  with  the  court-theaters 
of  Germany  and  with  the  subsidized  opera-houses  as 
well.  Although  these  opera-houses  and  these  theaters 
are  aided  by  subsidies,  either  public  or  private,  they 
are  never  rendered  independent  of  the  box-office.  They 
have  to  rely  for  support  on  the  whole  body  of  play- 
goers and  opera-lovers;  and  if  they  do  not  succeed  in 
attracting  these,  then  their  bankruptcy  is  unavoidable. 
And  this  is  as  it  should  be,  for  no  art  is  ever  prosperous 
when  it  is  aristocratic,  since  the  basis  of  every  art  is 
our  common  humanity. 

It  is  possible  that  those  superfine  spirits  who  culti- 
vate an  aristocratic  aloofness  from  their  fellow-men 
may  be  tempted  to  assert  that  if  the  theater  is  a  func- 
tion of  the  crowd,  then  the  drama  must  be  of  neces- 
sity the  vulgarest  of  the  arts,  incapable  of  delicacy  of 
analysis,  of  subtlety  of  expression,  and  of  any  higher 
poetic  flight  than  can  be  appreciated  by  the  common 
herd.  But  this  assertion  is  based  on  a  confusion  be- 


82  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

tween  the  residuum  of  the  populace  and  the  whole 
body  of  the  public,  including  the  most  intelligent  and 
the  most  cultivated.  It  is  to  the  whole  public  that  the 
dramatist  must  appeal;  and  he  mistakes  his  larger 
opportunity  if  he  prefers  to  attract  only  the  residuum. 
If  the  theater  is  to-day  a  function  of  the  crowd,  so  it 
always  has  been;  and  there  is  a  patent  absurdity  in 
suggesting  that  the  necessity  of  pleasing  the  people  as 
a  whole  prevented  Racine  from  delicacy  of  analysis, 
Moliere  from  richness  of  expression,  and  Shakspere 
from  exalted  flights  of  poetic  self-expression. 

Even  the  vulgar  residuum  of  the  populace  is  often 
warmly  responsive  to  loftiness  of  theme  and  to  large- 
ness of  treatment.  "Hamlet"  is  ever  one  of  the  most 
popular  plays  which  can  be  presented  on  the  English- 
speaking  stage;  and  "Tartuffe"  is  unfailingly  attrac- 
tive to  French  audiences.  The  intellectual  aristocrat  is 
often  tempted  to  underestimate  the  good  sense  of  the 
plain  people  as  this  is  displayed  in  art  and  in  politics. 
President  Butler,  in  his  suggestive  discussion  of 
"True  and  False  Democracy,"  has  warned  us  never 
to  forget  "  that  the  same  individuals  constitute  both  the 
mob  and  the  people.  When  their  lower  nature  rules, 
these  individuals  are  a  mob ;  when  their  higher  nature 
guides,  they  are  the  people.  The  demagogue  makes 
his  appeal  to  the  mob ;  the  political  leader,  the  states- 
man, to  the  people."  So  in  the  theater,  even  though 
the  cheap  playwright  may  prefer  to  put  together  pieces 
good  enough  only  for  the  mob,  sometimes  even  pander- 
ing to  their  baser  instincts,  the  true  dramatist  never 
fears  the  result  of  a  lofty  appeal  to  the  people  as  a 
whole.  He  knows,  even  if  others  forget,  that  the 
poetic  dramas  which  the  literary  critics  now  most 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE   83 

esteem,  were  widely  successful  when  they  were  first 
produced  in  the  theater.  He  would  echo  the  opinion 
of  Cicero,  an  artist  in  letters  if  ever  there  was  one,  that 
"given  time  and  opportunity,  the  recognition  of  the 
many  is  as  necessary  a  test  of  excellence  in  an  artist  as 
that  of  the  few." 

It  is  a  significant  fact  that  the  real  dramatist,  tragic 
or  comic,  has  never  expressed  that  contempt  for  the 
mere  multitude  which  sometimes  falls  from  the  mouth 
of  the  dilettant  and  of  the  amateur.  He  does  not  ex- 
press this  sentiment  because  he  does  not  feel  it;  in- 
deed, he  could  not  feel  it  without  self -betrayal.  It  is 
his  duty  to  understand  the  multitude,  to  sympathize 
with  it,  to  reveal  it  to  itself.  Moliere  was  frank  in  his 
declaration  of  his  reliance  on  the  common  sense  of  the 
plain  people.  "I  hold  it  to  be  as  difficult  to  attack  a 
work  which  the  public  approves,"  so  he  declared  in 
a  preface,  "  as  to  defend  one  which  it  condemns."  Suc- 
cess on  the  stage  is  probably  impossible  to  a  dramatist 
who  really  has  a  contempt  for  the  crowd.  Dryden,  for 
example,  was  free  in  voicing  his  distaste  for  the  comic 
drama  of  his  own  day,  and  he  seems  to  have  despised 
the  contemporary  playgoers  he  strove  to  please  by  la- 
bored attempts  at  fun.  And  Dryden  is  not  one  of  the 
masters  of  English  comedy ;  in  fact,  his  fame  might  be 
fuller  if  he  had  never  adventured  himself  into  the  comic 
drama.  It  is  related  that  a  distinguished  contemporary 
novelist  once  remarked  that  whenever  he  wrote  in  a 
play  any  passage  which  made  him  tingle  with  shame, 
then  he  knew  he  had  done  something  the  theatrical 
public  would  like.  But  his  knowledge  of  the  theatrical 
public  was  apparently  insufficient,  since  no  one  of  the 
plays  containing  these  passages  has  succeeded  on  the 


84  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

stage.  He  might  think  the  public  foolish,  but  he  failed 
to  appreciate  its  shrewdness.  It  may  be  foolish,  in  cer- 
tain ways  and  to  a  certain  extent ;  but  it  knows  what  it 
likes,  —  and  above  all  else,  it  likes  sincerity. 

IV 

Probably  the  cause  of  this  novelist's  error  can  be 
found  in  the  fact  that  he  was  a  novelist,  and  that  he 
believed  that  the  drama  was  only  another  form  of  fic- 
tion, in  which  he  could  put  the  same  things  that  he  had 
put  into  his  novels.  But  a  play  is  not  a  novel ;  and  it 
has  to  be  something  wholly  unlike  a  novel.  Its  methods 
are  not  the  same,  and  its  subject-matter  is  also  differ- 
entiated from  that  proper  enough  in  a  narrative  to  be 
read  by  the  fireside.  There  are  themes  which  the  nov- 
elist can  treat  and  from  which  the  dramatist  is  de- 
barred, because  his  work  is  to  be  set  before  men  massed 
together,  and  not  before  scattered  individuals.  But 
what  the  dramatist  may  lose  from  the  duty  of  taking 
into  account  the  spectators  in  the  theater,  he  more 
than  regains  by  the  greater  impressiveness  of  the  play, 
by  its  more  direct  effect  on  those  who  see  it,  an  effect 
far  more  powerful  than  that  of  the  novel,  just  as  the 
influence  of  the  orator  is  deeper  than  that  of  the  es- 
sayist. The  French  government  permitted  the  publi- 
cation of  "Oncle  Sam"  and  of  "Germinal,"  but  it 
forbade  the  performance  of  Sardou's  play  and  the 
dramatization  of  Zola's  novel.  There  is  no  need  of  de- 
nying that  the  drama  has  its  limitations,  for  so  has 
every  other  art ;  and  effects  possible  to  one  art  are  not 
possible  to  another.  There  is  no  need  of  denying  even 
that  the  novel  has  its  own  advantages  over  the  play,just 
as  the  play  in  its  turn  has  its  advantages  over  the  novel. 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE      85 

Theophile  Gautier,  who  disliked  the  stage,  perhaps 
because  he  had  to  earn  his  living  as  a  theatrical  critic, 
used  to  disparage  the  drama  as  lagging  far  behind 
fiction  in  that  it  never  dealt  with  a  new  idea  until  long 
after  this  had  been  exploited  in  newspapers  and  in 
prose-fiction.  Perhaps  he  would  have  found  it  difficult 
to  prove  his  assertion ;  but  it  would  be  easy  to  give  a 
good  reason  why  there  might  be  some  warrant  for  it. 
It  is  because  the  drama  must  appeal  to  the  people  as  a 
whole,  and  not  merely  to  the  more  intelligent,  the  more 
cultivated,  the  more  advanced.  Until  an  idea  has  sunk 
into  the  popular  consciousness,  until  it  has  been  ab- 
sorbed by  the  main  body  of  a  playwright's  contem- 
poraries, he  can  put  it  into  a  play  only  at  his  peril. 
What  Wordsworth  said  of  the  poets  is  true  especially 
of  the  dramatic  poets,  —  that  they  write  under  the 
restriction  of  hoping  to  give  "immediate  pleasure  to 
a  human  being,  possessed  of  that  information  which 
may  be  expected  from  him,  not  as  a  lawyer,  a  physician, 
a  mariner,  an  astronomer,  or  a  natural  philosopher, 
but  as  a  Man."  In  other  words,  the  dramatist  has  ever 
to  find  the  greatest  common  denominator  of  the  public 
as  a  whole,  whereas  the  lyric  poets  and  the  novelists 
can,  if  they  choose,  narrow  their  appeal  to  a  single 
caste  or  a  single  class.  Here  we  can  perceive  the  justice 
of  the  general  feeling  that  partisan  politics  and  secta- 
rian religion  are,  both  of  them,  totally  out  of  place  on 
the  stage. 

The  theater  is  a  function  of  the  crowd ;  and  the  work 
of  the  dramatist  is  conditioned  by  the  audience  to 
which  he  meant  to  present  it.  In  the  main,  this  influ- 
ence is  wholesome,  for  it  tends  to  bring  about  a  dealing 
with  themes  of  universal  interest.  To  some  extent,  it 


86  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

may  be  limiting  and  even  harmful,  —  but  to  what  ex- 
tent we  cannot  yet  determine  in  our  present  ignorance 
of  that  psychology  of  the  crowd  which  Le  Bon  has 
analyzed  so  interestingly.  We  are  only  beginning  to 
appreciate  the  fact  that  a  group  of  men  and  women 
gathered  together  has  a  psychic  unity  of  its  own,  a 
consciousness  of  itself  as  an  entity,  a  soul  which  is  not 
merely  the  sum  total  of  the  souls  of  the  men  and  women 
present.  No  one  has  asserted  this  more  sharply  than 
Professor  Hibben.  He  declared  that  a  patent  fallacy 
underlies  the  saying  that  "the  whole  equals  the  sum 
of  the  parts."  Although  the  saying  may  be  sound  in 
mathematics  it  is  false  in  sociology:  — 

"  In  any  group  of  men,  in  a  clan,  a  tribe,  a  society,  in  church 
or  in  state,  the  whole  is  more  than  the  sum  of  its  parts.  The 
parts  may  be  seen,  they  may  be  counted.  We  find  them  in 
registers,  in  rosters,  in  tables  of  census  statistics,  and  yet 
the  communal  spirit  which  makes  for  unity  and  solidarity 
is  unseen.  It  is  the  esprit  de  corps,  without  which  the  body 
dies  and  returns  to  its  elemental  parts.  And,  within  the  still 
larger  range  which  embraces  the  circle  of  mankind  in  gen- 
eral, the  several  parts  are  bound  together  as  members  one 
of  another,  because  they  are  united  in  a  common  ancestry 
and  a  common  destiny,  a  common  weal  or  woe.  The  spirit 
of  humanity  makes  all  one." 

Thus  it  is  that,  in  the  playhouse,  every  successive 
audience  has  an  individuality  of  its  own,  differing  col- 
lectively from  other  audiences,  seeing  the  same  per- 
formance in  the  same  theater  in  the  same  week.  An 
afternoon  audience,  composed  mostly  of  women,  will 
take  the  points  of  a  play  in  quite  different  fashion 
from  an  evening  audience,  in  which  there  is  a  larger 
proportion  of  men.  Humorous  speeches  and  effects 
which  bring  hearty  laughs  at  night  will  sometimes 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE   87 

scarcely  evoke  even  a  condescending  smile  in  the  after- 
noon. 

An  audience  is  a  crowd,  and  it  has  the  special  char- 
acteristics of  any  other  crowd,  of  the  spectators  at 
athletic  sports,  of  the  participants  in  a  camp-meeting, 
of  the  delegates  to  a  political  convention.  And  it  has 
also  certain  characteristics  peculiar  to  itself,  to  the 
fact  that  it  is  gathered  in  a  theater,  that  it  is  composed 
of  a  group  of  playgoers.  Every  crowd  consists  of  hu- 
man beings  who,  when  they  are  a  part  of  the  crowd, 
and.  in  consequence  of  that  fact,  have  each  of  them  lost 
consciousness  of  certain  of  his  individual  mental  char- 
acteristics. On  the  other  hand,  every  one  of  them  has 
acquired  a  keener  consciousness  of  certain  mental 
and  emotional  qualities  which  he  has  in  common  with 
the  other  members  of  the  audience.  M.  Le  Bon's  doc- 
trine has  been  neatly  condensed  into  this  series  of 
statements :  — 

"The  mental  qualities  in  which  men  differ  from  one  an- 
other are  the  acquired  qualities  of  intellect  and  character; 
but  the  qualities  in  which  they  are  at  one  are  the  innate  basic 
passions  of  the  race.  A  crowd,  therefore,  is  less  intellectual 
and  more  emotional  than  the  individuals  that  compose  it. 
It  is  less  reasonable,  less  judicious,  less  disinterested,  more 
credulous,  more  primitive,  more  partisan;  and,  hence,  a 
man,  by  the  mere  fact  that  he  forms  a  part  of  an  organized 
crowd,  descends  several  rungs  on  the  ladder  of  civilization. 
Even  the  most  cultured  and  intellectual  of  men,  when  he 
forms  an  atom  of  a  crowd,  loses  consciousness  of  his  acquired 
mental  qualities  and  harks  back  to  his  primal  nakedness  of 
mind.  The  dramatist,  therefore,  because  he  writes  for  a 
crowd,  writes  for  an  uncivilized  and  uncultivated  mind,  a 
mind  richly  human,  vehement  in  approbation,  violent  in 
disapproval,  easily  credulous,  eagerly  enthusiastic,  boyishly 
heroic,  and  carelessly  thinking." 


88  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

And  Mr.  Clayton  Hamilton,  from  whom  this  ex- 
tract is  quoted,  added  that 

**  both  in  its  sentiments  and  in  its  opinions,  the  crowd  is  hugely 
commonplace.  It  is  incapable  of  original  thought  and  of  any 
but  inherited  emotion.  It  has  no  speculation  in  its  eyes.  What 
it  feels  was  felt  before  the  flood ;  and  what  it  thinks,  its  fa- 
thers thought  before  it.  The  most  effective  moments  in  the 
theater  are  those  that  appeal  to  commonplace  emotions  — 
love  of  woman,  love  of  home,  love  of  country,  love  of  right, 
anger,  jealousy,  revenge,  ambition,  lust,  and  treachery." 

This  is  what  underlies  Victor  Hugo's  assertion  in 
the  preface  of  his  "  Ruy  Bias,"  that  there  are  three 
classes  which  go  to  the  theater,  —  the  "  main  body  of 
spectators  who  demand  action,  women,  who  desire 
emotion,  and  thinkers  who  look  for  character."  In 
other  words,  story,  plot,  incident,  is  of  primary  im- 
portance in  a  play,  since  this  is  what  is  most  pleasing 
to  the  largest  number;  and  delicacy  of  character- 
delineation  and  veracity  of  psychology  are  only  sec- 
ondary. This  truth  was  seized  long  ago  by  Aristotle ; 
and  it  was  as  imperative  in  Athens  then  as  it  is  now  in 
Paris  and  in  New  York.  It  seems  to  explain  the  boast 
of  the  elder  Dumas  that  all  he  required  for  success 
on  the  stage  was  "  four  boards,  two  actors  and  a  pas- 
sion." 

The  audience  in  a  theater  is  first  of  all  a  crowd,  with 
the  characteristics  it  has  in  common  with  all  crowds. 
But  it  is  also  a  crowd  of  a  special  type,  in  that  it  has 
come  together  with  the  desire  of  recreation,  of  amuse- 
ment, of  pleasure.  Its  purpose  is  not  serious,  like  the 
purpose  of  the  camp-meeting  or  of  the  political  con- 
vention. It  is  inclined  to  resent  instruction  or  edifica- 
tion, since  it  feels  that  the  theater  is  not  the  fit  place 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE   89 

for  either  of  these  useful  things.  This  is  one  reason 
why  the  chief  dramatists  have  rarely  attempted  to 
preach  or  to  assume  the  attitude  of  the  instructor ;  they 
have  been  satisfied  to  present  life  as  they  saw  it  with 
their  own  eyes,  to  mirror  one  or  another  aspect  of 
the  infinite  complexity  of  human  existence,  leaving  the 
spectator  free  to  draw  his  own  moral  from  the  picture. 
This  is  the  reason  also  why  no  great  dramatic  poet 
has  ever  been  a  pioneer  in  philosophic  speculation.  It 
has  been  the  strength  of  the  great  dramatists  that  they 
were  not  too  far  in  advance  of  their  time,  that  they 
held  most  of  the  opinions  of  their  contemporaries,  con- 
tenting themselves  with  restating  the  eternal  common- 
places of  life  in  imperishable  phrase  for  immediate 
effect  on  their  contemporaries.  And  thus  in  not  striv- 
ing strenuously  to  be  up-to-date,  they  have  largely 
escaped  the  peril  of  being  out-of-date.  "Dramatic 
art,"  so  Professor  Letourneau  has  asserted,  "being 
an  essentially  collective  sort  of  literature,  addressing 
itself  to  the  multitude,  can  not  express  more  than  the 
average  of  the  prevailing  opinions,  of  the  ideas  current 
in  the  surrounding  social  medium ;  too  original  views, 
too  special  feelings,  are  not  in  its  domain." 


As  a  result,  we  can  see  that  any  people  is  likely  to 
have,  at  any  period,  the  drama  that  it  deserves,  since  it 
can  have  only  the  kind  of  play  that  it  is  willing  to  ac- 
cept. In  the  golden  days  of  Athens,  the  Greeks  had 
tragedy  of  the  noblest  type;  and  in  the  decadence  of 
Rome,  the  drama  was  degraded  to  vulgar  and  violent 
pantomime,  which  had  to  compete  for  popular  favor 
with  the  brutal  sports  of  the  arena.  And  even  a  spec- 


90  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

tator  to  whom  these  were  abhorrent  had  to  yield  to  the 
infection  that  emanated  from  his  fellows,  massed  all 
around  him  in  the  amphitheater.  Saint  Augustine  tells 
us  of  an  acquaintance  of  his  who  had  renounced  gladia- 
torial shows,  but  who  yielded  to  the  solicitation  of 
friends.  For  a  while  he  sat  with  closed  eyes,  refusing 
to  witness  the  deadly  combats,  but  when  he  relaxed 
his  guard  over  himself  and  opened  his  eyes,  he  was 
soon  caught  by  the  contagion,  and  he  swiftly  found  his 
soul  filled  with  sanguinary  joy. 

In  the  Colosseum,  the  crowd  had  the  baser  instincts 
of  the  mob ;  and  even  to-day,  in  places  of  amusement 
of  the  lower  sort,  we  can  discover  not  a  little  of  a  similar 
brutality.  Yet  these  are  exceptions.  In  the  theater 
nowadays,  the  crowd  is  not  to  be  confounded  with  the 
mob;  it  is  representative  of  the  average  of  the  com- 
munity and  not  of  the  inferior  elements  only.  It  is 
representative  of  the  main  body  of  men  and  women; 
and  at  bottom,  the  instinct  of  the  main  body  is  to  be 
relied  on.  Burke,  who  is  not  to  be  suspected  of  undue 
partiality  to  democratic  ideals,  did  not  hesitate  to  as- 
sert that  "  man  is  a  most  unwise  and  a  most  wise  being. 
The  individual  is  foolish.  The  multitude  for  the  mo- 
ment is  foolish,  when  they  act  without  deliberation; 
but  the  species  is  wise,  and  when  time  is  given  to  it,  as 
a  species  it  almost  always  acts  right." 

It  is  to  the  species  that  the  dramatist  addresses 
himself;  and  the  history  of  the  drama  affords  abun- 
dant evidence  not  only  that  the  species  acts  right,  but 
also  that  its  judgment  is  sound.  The  great  dramatists 
whose  works  we  study  reverently  to-day  were  the  most 
popular  playwrights  in  their  own  times.  The  plays  of 
Sophocles  and  Shakspere,  of  Calderon  and  of  Moliere, 


THE  INFLUENCE  OF  THE  AUDIENCE      91 

filled  the  theaters  when  they  were  first  produced.  The 
spectator  of  these  masterpieces  may  not  have  sus- 
pected that  they  were  masterpieces ;  he  may  not  have 
appreciated  the  rare  qualities  in  them  which  the  stu- 
dent discovers  now;  but  they  gave  him  the  specific 
pleasure  he  was  seeking  in  the  theater,  and  he  was 
ready  to  return  there  again  and  again  when  they  were 
acted. 

We  may  go  further  and  assert  that  this  broad  popu- 
lar acceptance  is  far  more  significant  of  abiding  merit 
than  the  laudation  of  any  minority  of  professed  critics. 
Whenever  there  has  been  a  divergence  of  opinion  about 
a  play  between  the  classes  and  the  masses,  time  has 
generally  proved  that  the  masses  were  wiser  than  the 
classes.  When  Shakspere  was  a  young  man,  Sidney 
published  his  "Defence  of  Poesy,"  in  which  he  poured 
scorn  upon  the  plays  that  then  held  the  English  stage ; 
he  besought  poets  to  take  pattern  by  the  drama  of 
Greece  and  of  Rome.  But  the  playgoing  public  of 
London  would  not  accept  sterile  imitations  of  this  sort ; 
and  it  gave  a  warm  welcome  to  the  large  and  free 
dramas  Shakspere  wrote  in  accord  with  the  bolder 
sentiment  of  the  Elizabethan  age.  In  France,  again, 
the  French  Academy,  at  Richelieu's  request,  condemned 
the  "  Cid  "  of  Corneille  for  its  violation  of  the  so-called 
"rules  of  the  drama."  But  the  playgoing  public  at 
Paris  knew  what  it  wanted,  and  in  despite  of  the  aca- 
demicians, it  flocked  to  the  theater  whenever  the  "  Cid  " 
was  performed.  The  true  dramatic  poet  puts  into  his 
plays  many  things  which  the  public  as  a  whole  may 
not  appreciate ;  but  it  is  always  for  the  public  as  a  whole 
that  he  writes  his  plays. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   LAW  OF  THE   DRAMA 

It  is  sometimes  supposed  that  the  drama  consists  of  incident.  It 
consists  of  passion,  which  gives  the  actor  his  opportunity;  and  that 
passion  must  progressively  increase,  or  the  actor,  as  the  piece  pro- 
ceeded, would  be  unable  to  carry  the  audience  from  a  lower  to 
a  higher  pitch  of  interest  and  emotion.  A  good  serious  play  must 
therefore  be  founded  on  one  of  the  passionate  cruces  of  life,  where 
duty  and  inclination  come  nobly  to  the  grapple.  —  ROBERT  Louis 
STEVENSON,  Memories  and  Portraits. 


THE  literary  drama  has  grown  out  of  the  folk-drama ; 
and  it  is  composed  to  be  performed  by  actors,  in  a 
theater,  and  before  an  audience.  But  what  is  its  es- 
sential quality?  In  what  vital  way  does  the  drama 
differ  from  the  epic  of  old  or  from  the  novel  of  our  own 
day?  What  are  its  necessary  characteristics?  What 
specific  quality  is  it  that  sets  the  drama  apart  from  all 
other  literary  forms  ?  To  attempt  to  define  this  differ- 
entiation by  saying  that  the  drama  has  to  tell  a  story  by 
means  of  dialogue  is  inadequate,  since  dialogue  is  often 
used  for  story-telling  in  poetry  and  in  prose-fiction,  in 
the  idyls  of  Theocritus,  for  example,  and  in  the  social 
satires  of  the  French  lady  who  has  chosen  to  call  her- 
self Gyp.  We  approach  nearer  to  a  satisfactory  defini- 
tion when  we  say  that  a  drama  is  a  story  in  dialogue 
shown  in  action  before  an  audience.  Its  essential 
quality  is  due  partly  to  the  fact  that  it  is  to  be  per- 
formed by  actors  in  a  theater,  but  mainly  to  the  fact 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA  93 

that  it  is  intended  for  the  public  as  a  whole  and  not  for 
the  separate  constituent  elements  of  the  public.  Its 
specific  characteristic  is  the  result  of  its  appeal  to  the 
throng  and  not  to  the  individual.  Its  appeal  is  to  the 
mass,  and  to  the  communal  desires  of  the  main  body. 
What  does  the  mass  wish  to  see  when  it  comes  together 
to  behold  a  story  in  dialogue  shown  in  action  by  per- 
formers on  the  stage  ?  What  does  the  crowd  demand, 
under  these  circumstances,  which  the  individuals  taken 
severally  would  not  insist  upon  ? 

It  is  the  late  Ferdinand  Brunetiere  who  has  most 
clearly  declared  the  distinctive  element  of  the  drama. 
To  the  volume  of  the  "  Annales  du  Theatre"  for  1893, 
the  French  critic  contributed  a  preface,  which  he 
called  the  "Law  of  the  Drama."  In  this  essay,  he 
formulated  more  elaborately  a  theory  which  he  had 
already  summarily  suggested  and  casually  applied  in 
the  series  of  lectures  on  the  "Epoques  du  Theatre 
Francais  (1636-1850),"  delivered  at  the  Odeon  Thea- 
ter in  the  winter  of  1891-2.  This  theory  had  there 
emerged  into  view  in  his  opening  lecture  on  Corneille's 
"  Cid  " ;  and  it  had  been  a  little  more  fully  stated  in  his 
final  lecture  on  Scribe  and  Musset.  As  Brunetiere 
pursued  his  task,  the  importance  and  the  utility  of  this 
theory  seem  to  have  impressed  him  more  and  more ;  he 
considered  it  anew,  and  in  its  remoter  implications, 
before  setting  it  forth  by  itself  in  his  contribution  to  the 
"Annales  du  Theatre"  for  1893. 

In  this  prefatory  essay,  he  began  by  pointing  out  that 
the  so-called  "  rules  of  the  drama  "  are  evidently  invalid. 
By  the  rules  of  the  drama,  he  meant  the  code  of  restric- 
tions which  were  held  to  give  correctness  to  comedy 
and  especially  to  tragedy.  This  legislation  was  the 


94  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

result  of  the  amplification  (by  La  Harpe  and  Nepomu- 
cene  Lemercier)  of  principles  laid  down  by  Boileau  and 
d'Aubignac,  and  derived  directly  from  the  Italian  the- 
orists of  the  Renascence,  Castelvetro  and  Robortello. 
The  decisions  of  these  critics  have  been  overruled  by 
the  authority  of  the  great  modern  dramatists  who  have 
unhesitatingly  violated  these  alleged  rules. 

Yet  since  the  drama  differs  fundamentally  from 
the  epic  and  from  prose-fiction,  it  must  have  some 
essential  principle  of  its  own.  If  this  essential  prin- 
ciple can  be  discovered,  then  we  shall  be  in  possession 
of  the  sole  law  of  the  drama,  the  one  obligation  which 
all  writers  for  the  stage  must  accept.  Now,  if  we 
examine  a  collection  of  typical  plays  of  every  kind, 
tragedies  and  melodramas,  comedies  and  farces,  we 
shall  find  that  the  starting  point  of  every  one  of  them 
is  the  same.  Some  one  central  character  wants  some- 
thing; and  this  exercise  of  volition  is  the  mainspring 
of  the  action.  In  Corneille's  "Cid,"  Chimerie  wishes 
to  avenge  her  father.  In  Moliere's  "  School  for  Wives," 
Arnolphe  wishes  to  marry  Agnes,  whose  ignorance 
seems  to  him  a  guarantee  of  fidelity.  Even  in  a  farce 
of  Labiche's,  the  hero  wishes  to  get  out  of  the  awkward 
complications  in  which  he  is  involved.  But  Labiche's 
hero  is  opposed  in  his  desires  by  the  fear  of  reprisals ; 
Moliere's  elderly  hero  is  unable  to  achieve  his  desire, 
because  love  for  Horace  awakens  the  unbending  reso- 
lution of  Agnes;  and  Corneille's  heroine  is  thwarted 
in  the  attaining  of  her  desire  by  the  opposition  of  a 
stronger  will  than  her  own.  In  every  successful  play, 
modern  or  ancient,  we  shall  find  this  clash  of  contend- 
ing desires,  this  assertion  of  the  human  will  against 
strenuous  opposition  of  one  kind  or  another. 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA  95 

Here,  then,  we  have  what  Brunetiere  declared  to  bet ^ 
the  law  of  the  drama.  He  made  it  plain  that  the  drama 
must  reveal  the  human  will  in  action;  and  that  the 
central  figure  in  a  play  must  know  what  he  wants  and 
must  strive  for  it  with  incessant  determination.  This 
is  what  differentiates  the  drama  from  the  novel, 
"Figaro,"  for  instance,  from  "Gil  Bias."  The  hero  of 
Beaumarchais  has  a  will  of  his  own  and  fights  for  his 
own  hand;  he  knows  what  he  wants  and  he  knows 
why  he  wants  it.  The  hero  of  Le  Sage  drifts  through 
life  along  the  line  of  least  resistance;  he  has  no  plans 
of  his  own  and  he  takes  what  chances  to  come  his 
way.  Figaro  acts;  Gil  Bias  is  acted  upon.  The  play  of 
Beaumarchais  may  be  made  into  an  acceptable  novel ; 
but  the  novel  of  Le  Sage  cannot  be  made  into  an  ac- 
ceptable play.  A  novel  may  be  dramatized  success- 
fully only  when  it  is  inherently  dramatic,  —  that  is  to 
say,  only  when  its  central  figure  is  master  of  his  fate  and 
captain  of  his  soul.  Action  in  the  drama  is  thus  seen 
to  be  not  mere  movement  or  external  agitation;  it  is 
the  expression  of  a  will  which  knows  itself. 

The  French  critic  maintained  also  that,  when  this 
law  of  the  drama  was  once  firmly  grasped,  it  helped  to 
differentiate  more  precisely  the  several  dramatic  species. 
If  the  obstacles  against  which  the  will  of  the  hero  has 
to  contend  are  insurmountable,  Fate  or  Providence 
or  the  laws  of  nature,  —  then  there  is  tragedy,  and  the 
end  of  the  struggle  is  likely  to  be  death,  since  the  hero 
is  defeated  in  advance.  But  if  these  obstacles  are  not 
absolutely  insurmountable,  being  only  social  conven- 
tions and  human  prejudices,  then  the  hero  has  a  pos- 
sible chance  to  attain  his  desire, —  and  in  this  case, 
we  have  the  serious  drama  without  an  inevitably  fatal 


96  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

ending.  Change  this  obstacle  a  little,  equalize  the 
conditions  of  the  struggle,  set  two  human  wills  in  op- 
position, —  and  we  have  comedy.  And  if  the  obstacle 
is  of  a  still  lower  order,  merely  an  absurdity  of  custom, 
for  instance,  we  find  ourselves  in  farce.  Of  course, 
these  several  dramatic  species  rarely  exist  in  complete 
purity  of  type;  comedy  often  declines  into  farce,  for 
example,  and  farce  not  infrequently  elevates  itself 
toward  comedy. 

Brunetiere  found  a  confirmation  of  his  theory  in  the 
fact  that  the  drama  has  most  amply  flourished  when 
the  national  will  has  stiffened  itself  for  a  magnificent 
effort.  Greek  tragedy  is  contemporary  with  Salamis ; 
and  the  Spanish  drama  is  contemporary  with  the  con- 
quest of  the  New  World.  Shakspere  was  a  man  when 
the  Armada  was  repulsed ;  Corneille  and  Moliere  were 
made  possible  by  the  work  of  Henry  IV  and  Riche- 
lieu ;  Lessing  and  Goethe  and  Schiller  came  after  Fred- 
erick. And  the  Orientals  have  no  vital  drama  because 
they  are  fatalists,  because  they  do  not  believe  in  that 
free  will  without  which  the  drama  cannot  exist.  It 
is  significant  that  men  of  action,  Richelieu,  Conde, 
Frederick,  Napoleon,  have  ever  been  fond  of  the 
theater.  A  belief  in  free  will  is  always  favorable  to  the 
drama,  whereas  a  belief  in  foreordination  may  be  not 
unfavorable  to  the  novel,  the  chief  figures  of  which  are 
not  required  always  to  know  their  own  minds. 

Here  Brunetiere  rested  his  case.  He  concluded  by 
calling  attention  to  the  difference  between  the  so-called 
rules  of  the  drama  —  which  are  always  narrow,  always 
rigid,  and  always  certain  to  be  broken  sooner  or  later 
because  of  this  narrow  rigidity  —  and  this  one  single 
law  of  the  theater,  as  he  stated  it,  large,  supple,  flexible 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA  97 

in  its  application,  simple  in  itself  and  yet  general,  rich  in 
its  consequences  and  ever  ready  to  enrich  itself  still 
further  by  all  the  confirmations  which  experience  and 
reflection  may  supply. 


It  is  not  too  much  to  say  that  this  statement  of  the 
law  of  the  drama  is  the  most  suggestive  and  the  most 
important  contribution  to  the  theory  of  the  theater 
which  has  been  made  for  many  years.  It  is  as  signifi- 
cant as  any  of  Lessing's  contributions  to  the  theory 
of  art.  The  more  clearly  it  is  perceived,  the  more  illu- 
minating it  will  be  found.  Brunetiere  has  here  given 
us  the  key  to  many  an  obscurity.  He  has  provided  us 
with  an  instrument  for  gaging  the  true  dramatic  value 
of  a  play.  He  has  put  into  our  hands  the  means  where- 
by we  can  explain  difficulties  otherwise  very  puzzling. 
For  instance,  he  has  enabled  us  to  see  why  it  is  that 
the  medieval  mysteries,  and  also  the  English  chron- 
icle-plays (which  more  or  less  follow  the  medieval 
model)  are  not  so  interesting  as  the  tragedies  in  which 
we  find  the  hero  "at  war  with  the  words  of  fate." 
To  the  central  figure  of  the  chronicle-play  things 
merely  happen,  and  while  we  may  be  interested  now 
and  again  in  the  separate  episodes,  our  attention  is 
only  languidly  held  by  the  story  as  a  whole ;  whereas  the 
central  figure  of  any  one  of  the  tragedies  stands  forth 
the  embodiment  of  will,  knowing  what  he  wants  and 
bending  all  his  powers  to  the  accomplishment  of  his 
purpose.  This  law  of  the  drama  explains  also  why 
novels,  full  of  bustle  and  abounding  in  variety  of  in- 
cident, have  often  failed  to  attract  the  public  when 
they  were  dramatized. 


98  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

If  any  cavil  must  be  made,  it  is  that  Brunetiere  took 
upon  himself  to  lay  down  the  law  somewhat  arbitra- 
rily. Perhaps  it  might  have  been  better  to  say  that  a 
consideration  of  all  the  masterpieces  of  the  drama, 
and  of  all  the  plays  of  less  value  which  have  now  and 
again  achieved  a  fleeting  success  on  the  stage,  discloses 
the  fact  that  the  attention  of  an  audience  in  a  theater 
can  be  aroused  and  retained  only  by  an  exhibition  of 
the  human  will.  As  individuals,  we  can  find  pleasure 
in  reading  about  the  misadventures  of  characters  with 
no  minds  of  their  own ;  but  when  we  are  massed  together 
as  spectators  in  the  playhouse,  these  nerveless  creatures 
no  longer  satisfy  us,. and  we  demand  men  of  a  sterner 
sort,  with  iron  in  the  blood  to  struggle  valiantly  for  the 
desire  of  their  hearts.  The  career  of  a  character  to 
whom  things  merely  happen  seems  to  us  insufficiently 
interesting  when  it  is  represented  in  action  on  the 
stage  before  us  collectively,  although  we  may  sever- 
ally follow  such  a  career  more  or  less  eagerly  when  we 
read  about  it  in  the  study.  Now  and  again,  of  course,  a 
piece  may  delight  some  few  of  us  solely  by  its  subtle 
revelations  of  character  or  by  its  ironic  picture  of  life ; 
but  the  plays  which  have  pleased  long  and  pleased 
many  have  always  an  essential  struggle  to  serve  as  a 
backbone.  In  other  words,  what  Brunetiere  promul- 
gated as  a  hard  and  fast  decree  may  be  set  forth,  if  we 
prefer  another  statement,  as  a  logical  deduction  from 
the  accumulated  experience  of  mankind. 

While  the  credit  for  declaring  this  law  thus  clearly, 
and  of  applying  it  so  as  to  bring  out  the  special  qual- 
ity of  the  drama,  and  to  make  plain  the  fundamental 
difference  between  a  play  and  a  novel,  is  undoubtedly 
due  to  Brunetiere,  he  had  not  a  few  predecessors  who 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA  99 

had  caught  sight  of  the  theory  which  he  was  to  iso- 
late sharply.  It  is  impossible  that  so  pregnant  a  truth 
about  one  of  the  foremost  of  the  arts  should  not  have 
been  perceived  by  earlier  critics.  Voltaire,  for  exam- 
ple, in  one  of  his  letters,  asserted  that  every  scene  in 
a  play  should  represent  a  combat ;  and  Stevenson  de- 
clared that  "  a  good  serious  play  must  be  founded  on 
one  of  the  passionate  cruces  of  life,  where  duty  and 
inclination  come  nobly  to  the  grapple."  This  coin- 
cides with  Schlegel's  assertion  that  tragedy  deals 
with  the  moral  freedom  of  man,  which  can  be  dis- 
played only  "  in  a  conflict  with  his  sensuous  impulses." 
So  Coleridge  emphasized  the  fact  that  accidents  ought 
not  to  be  introduced  into  tragedy,  since  "  in  the  tragic 
the  free  will  of  man  is  the  first  cause."  And  in  "  Wil- 
liam Meister,"  Goethe  had  gone  so  far  as  to  say  that, 
while  the  hero  of  a  novel  might  be  passive,  the  hero 
of  a  play  must  be  active,  since  "all  events  oppose 
him,  and  he  either  clears  and  removes  every  obstacle 
out  of  his  path,  or  else  becomes  their  victim." 

Goethe's  opinion  reappears  more  elaborately  stated 
in  Hegel,  who  treated  tragedy  at  length  and  with  his 
customary  subtlety.  In  setting  forth  compactly  Hegel's 
opinions,  Professor  Bradley  noted  that  "  in  all  tragedy 
there  is  some  sort  of  collision  or  conflict  —  conflict 
of  feelings,  modes  of  thought,  desires,  wills,  purposes; 
conflict  of  persons  with  one  another,  or  with  circum- 
stances or  with  themselves."  Then  the  British  critic 
brought  out  the  German  philosopher's  insistence  on 
the  essential  point  that  "  pity  for  mere  misfortune,  like 
fear  of  it,  is  not  tragic  pity  or  fear,  since  these  are  due 
to  the  spectacle  of  the  conflict  and  its  attendant  suffer- 
ing, which  do  not  appeal  simply  to  our  sensibilities  or 


100  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

our  instinct  of  self-preservation,  but  also  to  our  deeper 
mind  or  spirit."  This  truly  tragic  conflict  appeals  to  our 
spirit  because  it  is  of  the  spirit,  being  a  conflict  "be- 
tween powers  that  rule  man's  spiritual  life  and  have  the 
right  to  rule  it.  They  are  the  substance  of  humanity, 
and  especially  of  man's  ethical  nature.  The  family  and 
the  state,  the  bond  of  parent  and  child,  of  brother  and 
sister,  of  husband  and  wife,  of  citizen  and  ruler,  or 
citizen  and  citizen,  with  the  obligations  and  feelings 
appropriate  to  these  bonds ;  and  again  the  powers  of 
personal  love  and  honor,  or  of  devotion  to  a  great 
cause  or  an  ideal  interest  like  religion  or  science,  or 
some  kind  of  social  welfare  —  such  are  the  forces 
exhibited  in  tragic  action."  And  as  these  are  all  ac- 
knowledged to  be  "  powers  rightfully  claiming  human 
obedience,  their  exhibition  in  tragedy  has  that  in- 
terest, at  once  deep  and  universal,  which  is  essential 
to  a  great  work  of  art." 

in 

But  is  Brunetiere's  law  of  the  drama  really  con- 
tained in  Hegel's  theory  of  tragedy  ?  After  all,  Hegel 
is  dealing  with  tragedy  only  and  not  with  the  whole 
range  of  the  drama ;  and  he  is  but  giving  his  own  anal- 
ysis of  the  old  theory  of  the  tragic  conflict.  Brune- 
tiere  went  much  further ;  he  declared  a  principle  by 
which  the  drama  as  a  whole  is  differentiated  absolutely 
from  the  epic  and  prose-fiction.  His  law  governs  com- 
edy and  farce  as  well  as  tragedy.  Furthermore,  even 
in  considering  tragedy,  Brunetiere  laid  stress  not  so 
much  on  the  circumstances  of  the  conflict,  of  the  strug- 
gle in  which  the  hero  is  involved,  as  on  the  stark  as- 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA  101 

sertion  of  the  hero's  will.  He  made  plain  the  fact  that 
the  truly  dramatic  element  does  not  lie  in  the  mere 
clash  of  contending  forces,  but  rather  in  the  volition 
of  the  hero  himself,  in  the  firm  resolution  which  steels 
a  man  for  the  struggle.  This  is  a  most  significant 
simplification  of  the  older  idea;  and  it  is  most  helpful. 

In  this  simplification,  Brunetiere  has  gone  behind 
Hegel;  indeed  it  may  be  said  that  he  has  gone  back 
to  Aristotle.  The  "master  of  all  that  know"  was  ever 
the  ardent  champion  of  free  will  against  determinism ; 
and  perhaps  this  sympathetic  advocacy  of  a  principle 
which  is  the  fundamental  characteristic  of  the  drama 
is  added  evidence  that  Aristotle  was  not  only  the  first 
but  also  the  foremost  of  dramatic  critics.  He  held 
Sophocles  to  be  the  mightiest  of  the  three  great  Greek 
dramatic  poets;  and  one  reason  for  this  preference  is 
probably  his  keen  appreciation  of  the  dramaturgic 
dexterity  of  the  author  of  "CEdipus,"  the  faculty  of 
construction,  the  sheer  playmaking  skill  revealed  again 
and  again ;  but  another  reason  might  be  found  in  the 
fact  that  Sophocles  never  allowed  his  hero  to  be  a  mere 
plaything  in  the  hands  of  fate,  and  always  so  contrived 
his  story  that  the  impending  curse  did  not  become 
operative  except  by  the  volition  of  the  individual. 

Aristotle  anticipated  Coleridge  in  ruling  out  acci- 
dents and  in  declaring  that  poetry  rebels  against  the 
rule  of  chance.  And  he  emphasized  the  necessity  of 
plot,  that  is,  of  a  story  guided  by  the  human  will. 
"Without  action  there  cannot  be  a  tragedy,"  he  as- 
serted; "there  may  be  without  character."  As  Profes- 
sor Butcher  has  explained,  "  the  drama  not  only  implies 
emotion  expressing  itself  in  a  complete  and  significant 
action  and  tending  toward  a  certain  end,  it  also  im- 


102  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

plies  a  conflict."  The  British  scholar  has  also  sug- 
gested that  "we  may  even  modify  Aristotle's  phrase 
and  say  that  the  dramatic  conflict,  not  the  mere  plot, 
is  'the  soul  of  tragedy/"  And  we  may  in  turn  modify 
Professor  Butcher's  phrase  and  say  that  the  soul  of  the 
drama  is  not  in  the  dramatic  conflict  so  much  as  in  the 
naked  assertion  of  the  human  will  which  is  the  cause 
of  the  conflict. 

That  these  modifications  are  necessary  is  evidence 
that  Brunetiere's  law  of  the  drama  is  not  explicit  in 
Aristotle's  treatise,  any  more  than  in  Hegel's,  although 
it  may  be  a  development  of  their  kindred  theories 
which  they  would  both  of  them  accept.  It  was  Brune- 
tiere  who  shifted  the  emphasis  from  the  more  or  less 
external  conflict  to  the  internal  act  of  volition  which 
determines  the  struggle.  It  was  the  French  critic  who 
first  made  it  unmistakably  plain  that  the  drama  de- 
pends on  man's  free  will.  He  supported  his  doctrine 
by  examples  drawn  mainly  from  the  French  drama; 
but  other  illustrations  as  striking  can  be  found  in 
other  literatures. 

The  development  of  English  tragedy,  for  example, 
out  of  the  lax  chronicle-play,  which  was  only  a  strag- 
gling panorama  of  the  events  of  a  reign,  was  due  largely 
to  the  influence  exerted  by  Seneca's  tragedies,  poor 
enough  as  plays,  but  vigorous  in  the  stoical  assertion 
of  man's  power  over  himself  and  of  his  right  to  con- 
trol his  own  destiny.  This  development  of  English 
tragedy  may  even  have  been  helped  a  little  by  the  re- 
moter influence  of  Machiavelli,  traces  of  which  are 
abundant  throughout  Elizabethan  literature.  The  so- 
called  Machiavellian  villains  of  the  tragedy-of-blood 
may  reveal  a  total  misconception  of  the  acute  Italian's 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA  103 

principles;  and  yet  none  the  less  the  sharpening  of 
the  dramatic  conflict  may  have  been  helped  at  least  a 
little  by  Machiavelli's  reiterated  emphasis  on  the  duty 
of  the  strong  man  to  work  his  will  as  best  he  can,  de- 
ciding all  doubtful  points  in  his  own  interest. 

The  chief  advantage  of  Brunetiere's  law  is  that  it 
enables  us  to  set  off  the  true  dramatic  conflict  from 
the  grosser  forms  of  combat.  The  drama  cannot  exist 
without  the  theater;  and  the  theater  is  only  a  little 
differentiated  from  the  amphitheater.  The  stage  is 
first  cousin  to  the  arena ;  and  Professor  Groos  was  on 
safe  ground  when  he  asserted  that  "  the  pleasure  af- 
forded by  the  drama  has  one  very  essential  feature  in 
common  with  ring-contests,  animal  fights,  races,  etc., 
—  namely,  that  of  observing  a  struggle  in  which  we 
may  inwardly  participate."  That  is  to  say,  we  want  to 
take  sides ;  we  long  to  see  one  or  the  other  of  the  two 
parties  gain  the  victory ;  we  have  a  communal  instinct 
to  sympathize  with  some  one  strong,  central  character 
battling  against  odds,  with  whom  for  the  moment  we 
may  even  identify  ourselves  more  or  less. 

In  the  ancient  arena,  the  gladiators  fought  to  the 
death ;  and  with  so  poignant  a  presentation  of  the  dra- 
matic conflict  as  this  no  Roman  playwright  could  hope 
to  compete.  In  the  modern  circus,  the  bloodless  effort 
to  overcome  difficulty  has  often  an  element  of  lurking 
danger  which  supplies  an  added  piquancy.  Even  at 
its  loftiest  elevation,  the  drama  cannot  help  having  an 
obvious  kinship  with  the  "show-business";  and  as  we 
climb  steadily  from  the  cruel  and  deadly  sports  of  the 
Colosseum,  past  the  startling  exploits  of  the  circus,  up 
to  the  sumptuous  spectacle  of  the  ballet,  and  then,  at 
last,  aloft  to  the  subtlety  of  comedy  and  the  serenity 


104  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

of  tragedy,  we  find  the  several  steps  of  our  ascent  so 
close  together  we  cannot  tell  exactly  where  it  is  that 
the  true  drama  actually  emerges  into  view.  Here 
Brunetiere's  law  may  serve  as  a  test,  in  that  it  shifts 
the  emphasis  from  the  outer  struggle  to  the  inner 
stiffening  of  the  human  will,  which  controls  the 
combat. 

Even  in  the  cheaper  kinds  of  melodrama,  when  we 
behold  the  rivalry  of  a  villain  absolutely  villainous 
with  a  hero  entirely  heroic,  apparently  only  a  bald 
antithesis  of  black  and  white,  both  the  villain  and  the 
hero  want  the  same  thing,  —  usually  this  is  the  pos- 
session of  the  heroine ;  and  there  is  therefore  a  tense 
conflict  of  contending  determinations.  In  plays  of  a 
higher  class,  especially  in  the  social  drama,  dealing  with 
themes  of  contemporary  importance,  with  the  burn- 
ing questions  of  modern  life,  the  opposition  is  not  be- 
tween a  bad  man  and  a  good  man ;  it  is  between  two 
opinions,  between  two  men  each  of  whom  believes 
that  he  is  in  the  right,  —  each  of  whom,  in  fact,  is  in 
the  right  from  his  own  point  of  view.  And  the  true 
dramatist  does  not  take  sides;  he  holds  an  impartial 
attitude,  letting  both  his  characters  express  themselves 
honestly.  Perhaps  there  is  no  better  example  of  this 
than  the  "Gendre  de  M.  Poirier"  of  Augier  and 
Sandeau ;  and  probably  the  spectators  of  this  comedy 
sympathize  some  of  them  with  Poirier  and  some  with 
his  son-in-law. 

It  may  not  be  easy  always  for  the  spectator  to  de- 
clare exactly  what  the  struggle  is,  but  he  can  always 
recognize  the  desire  of  the  central  figure.  In  "Ham- 
let," for  instance,  externally  the  struggle  may  seem 
to  be  between  Hamlet  and  Claudius,  or  between  Ham- 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA  105 

let  and  his  own  weakness  of  will,  or  between  Hamlet 
and  an  overmastering  fatality  which  broods  over  him 
from  the  beginning.  But  there  is  no  doubt  about  the 
desire  of  Hamlet  himself;  he  wants  to  do  what  is 
right,  even  if  he  is  ever  in  doubt  as  to  what  he  ought 
to  do  and  even  if  he  finds  it  hard  to  make  up  his  mind. 
And  in  "  As  You  Like  It,"  the  strife  between  Orlando 
and  his  brother,  between  Rosalind  and  her  uncle,  — 
these  are  only  necessary  elements  of  the  mechanism 
of  the  story.  Orlando  knows  what  he  wants ;  he  wants 
Rosalind;  and  Rosalind  wants  him  to  want  her. 

IV 

When  we  have  once  accepted  and  assimilated 
Brunetiere's  law  of  the  drama,  we  can  utilize  it  to  in- 
terpret a  principle  laid  down  by  Sarcey.  That  very 
practical  critic,  who  passed  all  his  evenings  in  the 
theater  and  who  deduced  all  his  theories  from  obser- 
vation of  the  effect  of  the  acted  drama  upon  audiences, 
declared  that  in  every  story  which  is  fit  to  be  set  on  the 
stage,  there  are  certain  episodes  or  interviews  which 
must  be  shown  in  action  and  which  cannot  be  narrated 
by  the  characters.  He  called  these  the  "scenes  that 
must  be  treated,"  the  scenes  a  faire.  If  any  one  of 
these  essential  scenes  is  shirked  by  the  playwright,  if 
he  describes  it  in  his  dialogue,  instead  of  letting  the 
spectators  see  it  for  themselves,  then  the  audience  will 
be  disappointed  and  their  interest  will  flag. 

The  spectators  may  not  be  able  to  declare  the  rea- 
son for  their  dissatisfaction ;  but  they  will  be  vaguely 
aware  that  they  have  been  deprived  of  something  to 
which  they  were  entitled.  They  feel  that  they  have 
been  defrauded  of  their  just  expectations,  if  they  are 


106  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

not  made  eye-witnesses  of  a  vital  incident  which  the 
inexpert  dramatist  has  chosen  to  bring  about  behind 
closed  doors  or  during  one  of  the  intermissions  be- 
tween the  acts.  Sarcey  insisted  that  here  was  a  certain 
test  of  the  born  playwrights,  of  the  artists  who  have 
an  instinctive  mastery  of  the  theater,  that  they  have 
always  an  unerring  intuition  as  to  the  meetings  which 
the  spectators  will  expect  to  see. 

Now,  what  are  the  essential  scenes  without  which 
a  play  will  fail  to  impress  the  audience?  What  are 
these  scenes  which  must  be  shown  in  action?  Ob- 
viously, they  are  the  scenes  in  which  we  can  see  the 
struggle  of  contending  wills.  They  are  the  episodes 
wherein  the  dramatic  conflict  enters  on  its  acutest 
stage,  the  interviews  wherein  there  is  the  actual  colli- 
sion of  the  several  resolves,  the  clash  of  volition  against 
volition.  They  are  those  wherein  "passion  must  ap- 
pear upon  the  scene  and  utter  its  last  word,"  —  to 
borrow  Stevenson's  apt  phrase.  Thus  we  see  that 
Sarcey 's  theory  links  itself  logically  with  Brunetiere's. 
The  essential  characteristic  of  the  drama  is  that  it 
deals  with  the  human  will ;  and  a  play  therefore  loses 
interest  for  the  audience  when  the  playwright  fails  to 
let  us  see  for  ourselves  the  acute  crisis  of  this  clash  of 
contending  determinations. 

Brunetiere  and  Sarcey  derived  their  theories  from 
observation  of  the  practice  of  the  great  dramatists ;  and 
there  is  no  difficulty  in  adducing  illustrations  from  the 
masterpieces  of  the  drama  in  support  of  these  theories. 
All  the  great  dramatists,  ancient  and  modern,  have 
done  instinctively  what  Brunetiere  and  Sarcey  declared 
to  be  necessary.  In  the  "Agamemnon,"  for  example, 
JSschylus  lets  the  murder  of  his  chief  character  take 


THE  LAW  OF  THE  DRAMA  107 

place  out  of  sight,  for  that  is  only  the  inevitable  conse- 
quence of  the  meeting  of  Agamemnon  and  Clytemnestra 
which  he  sets  before  us.  In  "Macbeth,"  Shakspere 
shows  us  the  guilty  determination  of  Macbeth  and  Lady 
Macbeth  just  before  the  murder  of  Duncan,  which  is 
itself  all  the  more  impressive  because  it  is  not  shown. 
In  "  Othello,"  we  are  made  witnesses  of  the  working 
of  the  poison  of  jealousy  in  Othello,  as  this  is  distilled 
by  lago. 

In  "Tartuffe,"  Moliere  puts  before  us  the  attempt 
which  the  sanctimonious  rogue  makes  upon  the  vir- 
tue of  Elmire;  just  as  Sheridan  sets  on  the  stage  the 
assault  of  Joseph  upon  Lady  Teazle.  In  the  "  Doll's 
House,"  Ibsen  lets  us  hear  all  that  Nora  has  to  say 
after  she  has  discovered  the  depths  of  her  husband's 
pettiness.  The  expert  playwright  of  every  age  has 
been  aware  that  spectators  are  interested  only  in  what 
they  can  see  for  themselves  and  that  they  remain  but 
tepidly  attentive  to  what  is  told  them.  It  is  the  special 
privilege  of  the  theater  that  it  can  make  a  visible  ap- 
peal, with  all  the  impressiveness  of  the  thing  actually 
seen  and  not  merely  narrated.  And  it  is  only  at  his 
peril  that  the  playwright  fails  to  profit  by  this  privi- 
lege. 

The  validity  of  the  principles  laid  down  by  Brune- 
tiere  and  by  Sarcey  we  can  all  of  us  test  for  ourselves 
when  we  analyze  the  impression  made  upon  us  in  the 
theater.  If  we  have  found  ourselves  languid  and  bored, 
we  have  only  to  analyze  the  conduct  of  the  story  to 
discover  the  cause  of  our  dumb  dissatisfaction  and  to 
assure  ourselves  that  the  playwright  failed  to  present 
before  us  the  essential  scenes  of  the  essential  struggle. 
On  the  other  hand,  when  a  play,  tragedy  or  comedy, 


108  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

melodrama  or  farce,  has  held  our  attention,  a  little 
analysis  will  reveal  to  us  that  this  is  because  the  drama- 
tist has  made  us  spectators  of  the  scenes  that  must  be 
treated  to  bring  out  the  full  value  of  the  clash  of  con- 
tending volitions.  • 


CHAPTER  VI 

A   CHAPTER   OF  DEFINITIONS 

A  country  may  be  overrun  by  an  armed  force,  but  it  is  only  con- 
quered by  the  establishment  of  fortresses.  Words  are  the  fortresses 
of  thought.  They  enable  us  to  realize^pur  dominion  over  what  we 
have  already  overrun  in  thought ;  to  make  every  intellectual  conquest 
the  basis  of  operations  for  others  still  beyond.  —  SIR  WILLIAM 
HAMILTON,  Lectures  in  Metaphysics  and  Logic. 


IN  the  mechanic  arts,  and  in  the  market-place,  the 
need  of  new  words  is  met  by  the  swift  selection  of  the 
term  nearest  at  hand,  ill-chosen  it  may  be,  but  filling 
an  immediate  want  and  thereby  at  once  justifying  its 
use.  For  example,  in  the  art  of  electricity,  their  con- 
venience forced  promptly  into  circulation  such  a  mis- 
begotten word  as  "cablegram"  and  such  a  startling 
combination  as  "separately  excited  boosters."  But  in 
the  library  and  in  the  lecture  room,  higher  standards 
obtain,  and  the  rough-and-ready  methods  of  the  ma- 
chine shop  are  unacceptable.  As  a  result  of  our  squeam- 
ishness  in  the  manufacture  of  the  new  terms  needed, 
and  in  consequence  also  of  the  difficulty  in  winning 
general  acceptance  for  those  which  we  do  venture  to 
make,  the  vocabulary  of  criticism  lacks  many  a  word 
which  it  ought  to  have.  For  instance,  there  is  no  sat- 
isfactory way  of  distinguishing  the  true  short-story 
from  the  casual  narrative  which  happens  to  be  brief, 
although  it  might  have  been  long.  And  there  is  no 
single  word  for  that  most  precious  gift  to  humanity 


110  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

known  as  the  sense-of-humor,  the  negative  quality 
which  prevents  a  man  from  taking  himself  too  se- 
riously, and  which  is  often  lacking  even  in  those  who 
possess  abundantly  the  positive  quality  known  as 
humor. 

In  the  liberal  arts,  wherein  emotion  dominates  and 
individuality  is  all-important,  we  cannot  hope  for  the 
exact  vocabulary  of  the  sciences,  wherein  fact  rules 
and  the  personal  equation  is  cautiously  eliminated. 
Horse-power,  foot-tons,  kilowatts,  —  these  are  all  terms 
of  precision  absolutely  independent  of  the  user's  own 
feelings,  whereas  tragedy,  romance,  imagination  are  all 
words  which  may  call  up  different  ideas  in  the  mind 
of  every  individual  writer  and  reader.  A  writer  can- 
not make  sure  that  any  reader  will  take  any  one  of 
the  words  in  the  same  sense  that  he  himself  employs 
it.  Professor  Gummere,  tracing  the  history  of  the 
popular  ballad,  had  to  devote  many  of  his  early  pages 
to  the  definition  of  the  type  itself,  pointing  out  clearly 
just  what  he  holds  it  to  be.  Probably  he  would  be  the 
first  to  admit  that  he  has  no  right  to  impose  all  the 
elements  of  his  definition  upon  every  other  historian 
of  literature  who  shall  hereafter  consider  the  subject; 
and  certainly  the  other  historians  would  be  emphatic 
in  denying  his  claim  if  he  had  insisted  on  it.  In  like 
manner,  we  find  the  opening  chapter  of  Professor 
Thorndike's  illuminating  history  of  English  tragedy 
occupied  by  the  author's  effort  to  arrive  at  a  defini- 
tion of  the  type,  as  it  arose  in  Greece  and  as  it  has 
developed  in  Great  Britain. 

There  is  an  advantage  in  insisting  upon  resolute 
definitions.  Even  if  scientific  precision  is  not  to  be 
hoped  for,  every  writer  gains  by  the  sturdy  struggle  to 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  111 

make  sure  that  at  least  he  knows  exactly  what  he  him- 
self intends  by  the  words  he  employs.  He  cannot  be 
certain  that  the  majority  of  his  readers  will  always  take 
these  words  in  his  sense ;  but  if  he  can  impose  his  defi- 
nition upon  only  a  few,  others  will  follow  in  due  season, 
until  the  terminology  of  the  art  is  made  more  precise. 
We  all  recognize  now  the  value  of  Coleridge's  distinc- 
tion between  imagination  and  fancy.  We  can  all  ap- 
preciate the  distinction  between  true  romance,  peren- 
nial and  eternal,  and  the  neo-romanticism  which  was 
aping  it  a  century  ago.  We  are  most  of  us  ready  now 
to  admit  that  the  short-story  is  a  type  by  itself,  differ- 
ing from  the  novel,  as  the  lyric  differs  from  the  epic, 
not  in  its  brevity  only,  but  also  in  its  object.  We  have 
been  led  to  a  clearer  understanding  of  the  development 
of  the  Elizabethan  drama  by  the  devoted  labors  of  the 
scholars  who  have  revealed  to  us  the  existence  of  the 
special  types  which  they  have  called  the  chronicle-play 
and  the  tragedy-of-blood.  These  names  for  groups  of 
plays,  hitherto  lost  in  the  immense  mass  of  our  older 
drama,  are  not  merely  convenient,  they  are  positively 
helpful  to  every  student  of  the  stage. 

When  we  set  out  to  investigate  the  slow  evolution  of 
the  drama  in  our  language,  we  are  entitled  to  feel  that 
we  have  taken  a  long  step  in  advance  as  soon  as  we 
have  attained  to  a  knowledge  of  the  special  character- 
istics of  the  mystery,  the  morality,  the  chronicle-play, 
the  tragedy-of-blood,  tragi-comedy,  the  comedy-of- 
humors,  the  heroic-play,  the  ballad-opera,  sentimental- 
comedy,  the  closet-drama,  and  the  problem-play.  We 
have  gone  still  further  forward  when  we  have  learned 
how  tragedy  was  developed  out  of  the  tragedy-of-blood, 
as  the  tragedy-of-blood  had  been  developed  out  of  the 


112 


A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 


chronicle-play.  And  in  like  manner,  any  one  under- 
taking a  study  of  the  history  of  fiction  cannot  fail  to 
find  profit  in  the  history  of  the  rise  and  fall  of  the 
pastoral-romance,  the  romance-of-chivalry,  the  pica- 
resque-romance, the  oriental-tale,  the  short-story,  the 
detective-story,  the  sea-tale,  and  the  novel-with-a-pur- 
pose. 

These  names  may  mean  little  or  nothing  to  the  sev- 
eral authors,  each  bent  on  expressing  his  vision  of  life 
as  best  he  could ;  nor  need  they  be  pressed  unduly  on 
the  attention  of  ordinary  readers,  content  to  enjoy 
without  question.  Every  student  can  find  his  profit 
in  keeping  them  in  mind;  but  he  must  remember  al- 
ways that  we  have  no  right  to  assume  that  the  author 
ever  gave  a  thought  to  the  specific  name  the  historians 
of  literature  might  one  day  bestow  on  his  masterpiece. 
Often  he  would  have  been  puzzled  himself  to  declare 
the  literary  type  to  which  it  properly  belonged.  Rare 
indeed  is  the  writer  who  has  set  himself  down  delib- 
erately to  compose  a  chronicle-play  or  a  tragedy-of- 
blood  which  should  be  only  and  strictly  a  chronicle-play 
or  a  tragedy-of -blood.  These  questions  of  terminology 
are  for  critics  only.  The  creators  are  careless  in  the 
matter ;  they  are  seeking  to  express  themselves  in  one 
of  the  forms  popular  at  the  moment,  never  hesitating 
to  stretch  this  form  till  it  cracks,  or  to  contaminate  it 
with  some  other  type. 

If  any  one  had  told  Moliere  that  his  two  master- 
pieces, the  "  Misanthrope"  and  "  Tartuffe,"  stepped  out 
of  the  domain  of  pure  comedy  and  crossed  over  into  that 
of  tragedy,  it  is  probable  that  this  revelation  would 
have  worried  him  very  little ;  and  Shakspere  made  fun 
of  the  mania  for  classification  when  he  had  the  pedantic 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS          113 

Polonius  present  to  Hamlet  a  company  of  actors  the 
best  in  the  world  for  "  tragedy,  comedy,  history,  pas- 
toral, pastoral-comical,  historical-pastoral,  tragical- 
historical,  tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,  scene 
undividable  or  poem  unlimited."  And  in  Professor 
Baker's  "  Development  of  Shakspere  as  a  Dramatist," 
he  makes  the  point  that  the  tragedies  of  the  English 
dramatist  may  have  seemed  to  the  public  of  their  own 
day  "not  tragedies  at  all  but  merely  more  masterly 
specimens  of  dramatic  story-telling  than  the  things 
that  had  preceded  them."  The  Elizabethan  audience, 
accustomed  to  the  loosely  knit  chronicle-plays,  found 
the  tragedies  more  interesting  without  ever  stopping 
to  think  that  they  were  different  in  kind  as  well  as  in 
degree.  To  Shakspere,  it  is  possible  that  "Macbeth" 
may  have  been  only  a  chronicle-play  more  effectively 
constructed. 

When  M.  Rostand  had  written  a  part  around  M. 
Coquelin  and  had  invented  a  story  to  carry  the  part,  he 
found  himself  confronted  by  the  difficulty  of  classifying 
his  drama;  and  he  solved  the  puzzle  by  reviving  an 
old  name  for  the  new  type.  He  declared  that  "  Cyrano 
de  Bergerac"  was  a  heroic-comedy.  Goldsmith  called 
"She  Stoops  to  Conquer"  a  comedy;  and  when  cer- 
tain critics  insisted  that  it  was  only  a  farce,  and  that 
it  contained  some  scenes  "too  mean  even  for  farce," 
he  may  have  shrugged  his  shoulders,  since  the  public 
had  laughed  at  his  play,  not  asking  whether  their  risi- 
bles  had  been  excited  by  a  farce  or  a  comedy.  And 
Mark  Twain  would  probably  be  surprised  if  it  should 
be  pointed  out  to  him  that  "Huckleberry  Finn"  is 
really  a  picaresque-romance,  a  direct  descendant  of 
"Gil  Bias"  and  "Lazarillo  de  Tonnes."  Very  likely 


114  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  statement  would  not  interest  him,  since  "  Huckle- 
berry Finn"  would  remain  thereafter  just  what  it  had 
been  before. 

n 

But  if  those  labels  matter  little  to  the  creators,  they 
have  their  importance  to  the  investigators  of  literary 
evolution.  We  may  modify  Pascal's  dictum  and  de- 
clare that  half  of  the  art  of  criticism  lies  in  the  preci- 
sion of  the  definitions.  And  to  the  student  of  any  art, 
there  is  unfailing  profit  in  a  firm  grasp  of  classification. 
When  he  has  really  apprehended  the  essential  char- 
acteristics of  any  special  type,  he  is  likely  to  be  sur- 
prised to  discover  it  unexpectedly  turning  up  in  pe- 
riods when  it  has  been  supposed  to  have  practically 
disappeared.  There  is  the  chronicle-play,  for  example, 
which  flourished  abundantly  in  Shakspere's  youth. 
Professor  Schelling  thinks  that  it  died  out  when  it  had 
run  its  course  in  the  seventeenth  century,  and  no  doubt 
the  name  has  departed  from  ordinary  speech ;  but  the 
thing  itself  can  be  found  again  and  again  in  the  dra- 
matic literature  of  the  nineteenth  century,  and  two 
striking  examples  are  visible  already  in  the  first  decade 
of  the  twentieth  century.  The  writer  of  a  chronicle- 
play  applied  to  a  lay  subject  the  practices  of  the  mys- 
tery which  set  forth  the  gospel-story;  and  he  sought 
to  put  into  action  and  dialogue  all  the  episodes  of  the 
career  he  dealt  with.  He  took  it  as  a  whole  and  pre- 
sented it  as  it  came  to  him,  with  little  selection,  sup- 
pression, or  climax.  He  felt  no  call  to  focus  interest  on 
an  essential  struggle  and  to  make  every  scene  con- 
verge toward  a  central  point.  His  method  was  only 
externally  that  of  the  drama;  for  what  he  wanted  to  do 
was  only  to  show  a  narrative  in  action  for  the  benefit 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  115 

of  those  who  could  not  or  would  not  read  the  original 
story.  When  we  have  once  grasped  the  characteristics 
of  the  type,  we  can  see  easily  enough  that  this  is  in 
fact  the  method  of  the  elder  Dumas  in  his  "Napo- 
leon" and  of  Giacommetti  in  his  "Marie  Antoinette." 
It  is  the  method  also  of  Mr.  Stephen  Phillips  in  his 
"Ulysses"  and  of  Mr.  Percy  Mackaye  in  his  "Jeanne 
d'Arc."  Tennyson's  "Queen  Mary"  and  "Becket" 
are  both  of  them  chronicle-plays,  —  histories,  if  we 
prefer  the  Shaksperian  term.  They  are  modelled  on 
the  loose  and  straggling  pieces  written  by  Shakspere 
before  he  had  learnt  how  to  compact  a  tragic  plot. 
And  there  is  no  denying  that  the  chronicle-play  is 
likely  to  reappear  again  more  than  once  in  the  coming 
century,  since  it  is  a  lax  and  easy  form,  forever  tempt- 
ing to  poets  who  are  unwilling  to  take  the  trouble  to 
master  the  technic  of  the  theater  of  their  own  time. 
It  has  been  a  distinct  advantage  to  the  student  of 
the  drama  that  the  terms,  chronicle-play  and  tragedy- 
of -blood,  have  won  general  acceptance  to  describe 
special  types  of  the  drama.  It  would  be  a  far  greater 
advantage  if  we  were  able  to  use  with  equal  precision 
two  more  important  terms.  These  are  comedy  and 
tragedy,  both  of  them  words  of  loose  meaning,  which 
cannot  be  applied  with  any  rigorous  exactness.  Even 
when  taken  together,  they  fail  hopelessly  to  cover  the 
field,  which  seems  to  be  divided  between  them.  The 
setting  up  of  these  two  words  over  against  each  other 
would  appear  to  imply  that  any  play  which  is  not  a 
tragedy  must  be  a  comedy,  and  any  play  not  a  comedy 
must  be  a  tragedy.  But  this  is  obviously  absurd,  for 
there  are  plays  a-plenty  which  are  neither  tragedy  nor 
comedy,  and  which  also  are  not  even  tragi7comedy, 


116  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

in  any  of  the  many  shifting  meanings  of  that  bastard 
term. 

The  word  tragi-comedy  seems  to  have  been  first 
used  by  Plautus  in  his  "  Amphitryon/*  because  he  com- 
bined serious  and  comic  effects,  setting  gods  by  the 
side  of  slaves.  Sidney  declared  that  its  distinguishing 
quality  was  to  be  found  in  its  "mingling  kings  and 
clowns,"  and  in  that  its  author  was  willing  to  "match 
hornpipes  and  funerals."  Here  we  perceive  a  survival 
of  the  now  exploded  belief  that  tragedy  could  properly 
present  only  exalted  personages  and  that  it  ought  to 
be  free  from  all  admixture  of  the  comic,  —  although 
the  "Alcestis"  of  Euripides  has  both  a  humorous 
character,  the  intoxicated  Heracles,  and  a  happy  end- 
ing. Nowadays  we  take  a  larger  view  of  tragedy,  and 
are  ready  to  see  it  even  in  the  humblest  of  families. 
Few  would  be  disposed  to-day  to  deny  the  term  to  the 
somber  "Ghosts"  of  Ibsen;  although  this  drama  is 
in  plain  prose,  although  it  presents  plain  people,  and 
although  it  does  not  actually  end  in  death,  we  feel  in 
it  the  largeness  of  a  truly  tragic  theme. 

Both  in  English  and  in  French,  tragi-comedy  had 
a  long  struggle  for  life;  and  finally  failed  to  establish 
itself  in  either  language,  although  Corneille  used  it 
to  describe  his  "Cid"  and  Fletcher  to  describe  his 
"Faithful  Shepherdess."  Even  in  Fletcher's  time, 
three  centuries  ago,  its  proper  application  was  so 
doubtful  that  he  was  forced  to  declare  his  own  defini- 
tion in  his  preface  to  this  pastoral  play :  "  A  tragi-com- 
edy is  not  so  called  in  respect  of  mirth  and  killing,  but 
in  respect  that  it  wants  death,  which  is  enough  to  make 
it  no  tragedy,  yet  brings  some  near  it,  which  is  enough 
to  make  it  no  comedy,  which  must  be  a  representation 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  117 

of  familiar  people."  To-day  we  have  no  special  term 
to  apply  to  a  piece  such  as  Fletcher  here  describes, 
and  the  best  we  can  do  is  simply  call  it  a  "play."  Yet 
Mr.  Henry  Arthur  Jones  chose  to  revive  tragi-comedy 
as  the  proper  designation  for  his  "  Evangelist,"  and  it 
would  have  been  convenient  to  be  able  to  use  tragi- 
comedy to  describe  Mr.  Clyde  Fitch's  "Climbers," 
which  although  satiric  in  intent,  skirted  the  edge  of 
tragedy;  indeed,  it  is  said  that  one  manager  declined 
this  drama  because  he  did  not  believe  that  the  public 
would  take  any  interest  in  a  play  "which  began  with 
a  funeral  and  which  ended  with  a  suicide." 

For  a  variant  of  the  type  of  play  which  Fletcher  and 
Beaumont  originated  and  which  Shakspere  took  over 
from  them  (in  the  "Winter's  Tale,"  for  example), 
Professor  Thorndike  has  suggested  the  appropriate 
term  of  dramatic-romance.  And  here  again  is  a  con- 
venient term  to  describe  certain  modern  pieces  only 
too  prevalent  in  our  theaters  of  late,  most  of  them 
dramatizations  of  pseudo-historical  or  wholly  fantastic 
tales  of  adventure,  such  as  "When  Knighthood  Was 
in  Flower"  and  the  "Prisoner  of  Zenda."  The  word 
tragedy  seems  to  convey  a  fairly  simple  idea ;  but,  as 
Fletcher  remarked,  it  connotes  a  deadly  termination 
of  the  story,  and  so  it  apparently  excludes  all  those 
serious  dramas  which  fail  to  end  fatally.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  word  comedy  has  been  broadened  to  in- 
clude all  the  manifestations  of  the  comic  spirit  on  the 
stage  —  the  lyrical-burlesque  of  Aristophanes  and  the 
acibbatic  farce  of  the  Italians,  which  we  know  as 
the  comedy-of-masks,  as  well  as  the  brilliant  satires 
of  contemporary  society  such  as  Sheridan  and  Beau- 
marchais  gave  us.  That  is  to  say,  tragedy  is  applied 


118  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

strictly  to  only  one  of  the  several  types  of  serious  drama, 
the  one  in  which  death  rings  down  the  curtain ;  whereas 
comedy  is  stretched  to  include  every  kind  of  humor- 
ous piece.  As  a  result,  we  have  no  name  for  the  special 
type  of  comedy  which  corresponds  to  the  special  type 
of  tragedy  —  the  comic  play  which  deals  with  life  sin- 
cerely and  satirically,  without  exaggerated  caricature 
in  the  character-drawing  and  without  extravagant 
fun-making  in  the  episodes.  High-comedy  is  what 
one  might  call  the  play  of  this  class,  taking  as  our 
typical  specimens  the  "Femmes  Savantes"  of  Moliere, 
the  "Way  of  the  World"  of  Congreve,  the  "School 
for  Scandal"  of  Sheridan,  and  the  "Gendre  de  M. 
Poirier"  of  Augier  and  Sandeau.  In  this  wise  and 
witty  comedy-of -manners,  —  to  give  it  another  name, 
more  widely  used  but  less  exactly  descriptive  —  the 
action,  however  serious  it  may  seem,  never  stiffens 
into  serious  drama;  and,  on  the  other  hand,  however 
amusing  it  may  be,  it  never  relaxes  into  the  robust  and 
boisterous  mirth  of  mere  farce.  Rich  as  is  the  dra- 
matic literature  of  the  world,  the  plays  worthy  to  be 
classified  under  this  head  are  surprisingly  few.  Mod- 
ern British  dramatists  have  given  us  occasional  speci- 
mens of  this  difficult  form,  Oscar  Wilde's  "Lady 
Windermere's  Fan,"  for  example,  and  Mr.  Henry 
Arthur  Jones's  "  Liars."  The  Greeks,  from  whom  we 
have  perfect  examples  of  pure  tragedy,  left  us  not  a 
single  specimen  of  high-comedy  —  although,  of  course, 
it  is  possible  that  one  may  yet  be  discovered  amid  the 
plays  of  Menander,  if  we  can  replevin  them  from 
oblivion. 

What  is  even  more  curious  is  that  there  is  not  really 
a  satisfactory  specimen  of  high-comedy  to  be  selected 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  119 

out  of  the  immense  mass  of  the  Elizabethan  drama. 
No  one  of  Shakspere's  comedies  and  not  one  of  Ben 
Jonson's  conforms  to  this  special  type.  The  comic 
dramas  of  Ben  Jonson  belong  to  the  class  known  as 
the  camedy-of -humors ;  and  the  most  beloved  of  Shak- 
spere's lighter  plays,  the  "Merchant  of  Venice"  and 
"  Much  Ado  about  Nothing,"  are  best  to  be  described 
as  examples  of  romantic-comedy,  the  form  which  the 
great  dramatist  specially  affected  and  which  he  im- 
proved for  his  own  use,  even  if  he  took  the  suggestion 
of  it  from  Greene.  In  this  romantic-comedy,  we  find 
Shakspere  sustaining  the  interest  of  the  more  playful 
theme,  with  which  he  is  chiefly  concerned,  by  the 
powerful  episodes  of  an  underplot  which  is  allowed 
at  times  to  become  almost  tragic  in  its  intensity. 

However  delightful  may  be  the  romantic-comedies 
of  Shakspere,  with  their  unceasing  poetic  charm  and 
their  unfailing  contrast  of  character,  they  have  not 
afforded  a  model  to  modern  dramatists,  who  seem  to 
have  felt  that  this  type  of  play  was  a  special  product 
of  the  semi-medieval,  semi-renascence  theater  of  the 
Elizabethans,  and  that  it  would  not  flourish  on  our 
modern  stage,  set  with  realistic  scenery.  Indeed,  the 
only  poet  of  the  nineteenth  century  who  was  attracted 
to  this  Shaksperian  form  was  Alfred  de  Musset;  and 
it  must  be  remembered  that  the  most  of  his  dramatic 
fantasies,  passionate  yet  mocking,  were  not  originally 
intended  for  the  actual  theater. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  high-comedy  of  Moliere, 
prepared  for  a  playhouse  which  was  modern  in  the  most 
of  its  conditions,  has  served  as  a  model  for  Congreve 
and  Sheridan,  for  Augier  and  Sandeau,  and  for  all 
who  have  since  essayed  the  comedy-of-manners.  That 


120  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

only  a  few  have  been  able  to  handle  this  form  success- 
fully is  evidence  that  it  is  inherently  difficult.  Appar- 
ently the  danger  is  twofold,  and  it  is  very  like  that 
which  confronts  the  lyrist  who  ventures  upon  the  true 
vers  de  societe.  The  playwright,  who  ought  to  make 
his  plot  the  result  of  the  clash  of  character  on  charac- 
ter, is  tempted  either  to  surcharge  his  story  with  senti- 
ment or  to  permit  his  sense  of  fun  to  run  away  with 
him.  In  the  one  case,  the  plot  ceases  to  be  comic  and 
becomes  unduly  emotional,  as  happened  in  "Frou- 
frou," which  begins  in  the  best  vein  of  high-comedy 
only  to  sink  at  last  submerged  in  sentiment.  And  in 
the  other  case,  the  play  becomes  wholly  comic,  and 
abandons  sentiment  for  breadth  of  humor,  as  hap- 
pened in  "  She  Stoops  to  Conquer,"  which  fails  some- 
what to  justify  its  claim  to  be  considered  strictly  as  a 
comedy-of -manners.  In  fact,  if  we  closely  scrutinize 
Goldsmith's  dramatic  masterpiece,  we  find  in  it  what 
may  fairly  be  called  fun  for  its  own  sake.  An  element 
of  frank  farce  makes  itself  evident ;  and  a  similar  farci- 
cal excess  is  discoverable  also  in  the  "  Rivals."  Probably 
this  is  what  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  had  in  mind  when  he 
ventured  to  define  a  comedy  as  "a  successful  farce 
written  by  a  deceased  author." 

in 

Often  has  farce  been  seized  as  a  term  of  reproach  to 
hurl  in  the  face  of  a  living  playwright ;  and  melodrama 
has  also  served  many  times  as  a  missile  of  offense.  But 
even  if  they  are  less  noble,  farce  and  melodrama  are 
types  of  plays  quite  as  legitimate  as  comedy  and  tragedy, 
and,  to  the  student  of  the  development  of  the  drama, 
each  of  them  has  an  interest  of  its  own.  All  the  more 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  121 

reason  is  there  that  the  two  words  should  be  defined, 
and  that  we  should  be  able  to  see  why  farce  and  melo- 
drama are  properly  held  to  be  inferior  to  comedy  and 
tragedy.  The  cause  of  this  inferiority  is  simple  and  it 
may  be  stated  simply.  In  high-comedy  (the  comedy-of- 
manners)  and  again  in  the  serious  drama  (of  which  true 
tragedy  is  one  class)  we  perceive  that  the  plot  is  made 
by  the  characters,  that  the  characters  dominate  the  plot, 
and  that  the  plot  is  what  it  is  solely  because  the  char- 
acters are  what  they  are.  But  in  farce,  and  again  in 
melodrama,  the  reverse  is  seen  to  be  the  case;  the 
plot,  the  situation,  the  incidents  are  the  controlling 
factors,  and  the  characters  are  only  what  the  plot 
allows  them  to  be  or  forces  them  to  be;  they  exist 
solely  in  order  that  they  may  do  what  their  maker 
bids  them,  instead  of  going  forward,  apparently  of 
their  own  volition,  impelled  by  the  logic  of  their  own 
individuality.  In  high-comedy  (in  "Tartuffe"  and 
in  the  "School  for  Scandal"),  and  in  true  tragedy  (in 
"OEdipus"  and  in  "Othello"),  the  successive  events 
of  the  story  are  brought  about  almost  inevitably,  as 
though  they  could  not  happen  otherwise;  whereas  in 
farce  and  in  melodrama,  the  action  of  any  character 
may  be  arbitrary  at  any  moment. 

If  the  characters  seem  to  lead  an  independent  life 
of  their  own,  existing  apart  from  the  circumstances 
in  which  they  happen  to  have  been  presented,  if  they 
linger  in  our  memories  as  fellow  human  beings,  whose 
course  of  conduct  we  can  venture  to  predict  from  what 
we  already  know  of  them,  then  the  play  in  which  they 
appear  is  not  fairly  to  be  classified  as  farce  or  as  melo- 
drama. But  if  the  characters  fade  into  nothingness, 
when  we  seek  to  separate  them  from  the  events  in 


122  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

which  they  took  part,  and  if  their  movements  have 
been  so  illogical  and  so  completely  controlled  by  an- 
other will  than  their  own,  that  we  are  ever  left  in  won- 
der as  to  what  they  will  do  next,  then  the  play  in  which 
they  are  puppets  is  farce  or  melodrama. 

If  we  apply  this  test  sincerely,  we  shall  find  our- 
selves declaring  that  at  least  a  dozen  of  Moliere's  most 
joyous  pieces  are  farces  —  excellent  farces,  beyond  all 
question,  but  farces  nevertheless.  Furthermore,  we 
shall  find  ourselves  putting  the  same  label  on  at  least 
two  of  Shakspere's  plays,  the  "  Comedy  of  Errors/' 
and  the  "  Merry  Wives  of  Windsor" ;  while  yet  another 
of  his  so-called  comedies,  the  "  Taming  of  the  Shrew," 
is  not  only  farce,  but  often  farce  of  a  violent  type,  of 
the  slapstick  and  knockabout  variety.  And  we  shall 
be  forced  also  to  record  that  "Titus  Andronicus," 
the  rank  tragedy-of -blood,  revised  by  Shakspere  in 
his  dependent  youth,  and  also  the  "  Cymbeline"  of  his 
later  years,  are  both  of  them  melodramas,  and  that 
•  neither  of  them  is  a  masterpiece  of  plot-making. 

When  two  surviving  comrades  of  Shakspere,  years 
after  his  death,  piously  gathered  his  plays  into  a  single 
folio  volume  —  the  most  precious  possession  of  all  mod- 
ern literature  —  they  risked  a  rough-and-ready  clas- 
sification into  three  groups,  comedies,  tragedies,  and 
histories;  and  even  then  they  could  find  no  fit  place 
for  that  nondescript  narrative  in  dialogue,  "Troilus 
and  Cressida."  Later  criticism  has  accepted  as  fairly 
accurate  the  grouping  together  of  the  so-called  his- 
tories, since  the  loosely  knit  pieces  thus  assembled 
are  all  of  them  chronicle-plays.  The  group  of  trage- 
dies is  now  seen  to  include  not  only  true  tragedies, 
like  "  Macbeth"  and  "Othello,"  but  also  at  least  one 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  123 

specimen  of  the  tragedy-of-blood.  But  the  designa- 
tion of  the  plays  in  the  third  group  is  unsatisfactory 
and  misleading,  however  wide  an  extension  may  be 
given  to  comedy.  Even  if  we  might  fairly  include  under 
this  head  the  romantic-comedies,  the  farces,  and  such 
humorous  fantasies  as  the  "Tempest"  and  the  "Mid- 
summer Night's  Dream,"  wherein  we  find  fairy  folk 
commingled  with  our  grosser  humanity,  and  the 
dramatic-romances  (of  which  the  "Winter's  Tale"  is 
an  example),  even  then  we  cannot  but  feel  that  com- 
edy is  absolutely  the  one  word  most  inapplicable  to 
"Measure  for  Measure"  and  "All's  Well  that  Ends 
Well,"  those  dark  plays  of  unlovely  intrigue  wherein 
Shakspere  dealt  with  themes  which  were  unworthy 
of  him  and  which  not  even  he  could  make  worthy. 

IV 

We  may  rest  certain  that  if  Shakspere  were  to  re- 
turn to  life  to-day,  he  would  waste  little  of  his  time 
on  the  immense  mass  of  contradictory  criticism  with 
which  commentators  have  obscured  his  works.  When 
he  was  alive,  he  never  took  himself  too  seriously ;  and 
if  he  came  back  to  this  modern  world  of  ours,  he 
would  find  many  things  to  do  more  interesting  than 
to  grope  through  guesses  of  all  sorts  about  his  inten- 
tions in  this  or  that  play,  which  he  wrote  primarily 
to  please  the  theatergoers  of  his  own  time,  and  second- 
arily to  express  himself  as  he  was  at  that  particular 
period  of  his  life.  Probably  it  would  surprise  him 
hugely  to  learn  that  the  plays,  which  he  did  not  even 
take  the  trouble  to  have  printed,  were  deemed  worthy 
of  study  in  our  universities,  and  that  critics  were 
engaged  in  classifying  them,  setting  down  this  as  a 


124  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

tragedy-of-blood  and  that  as  a  dramatic-romance,  a 
third  as  a  romantic-comedy,  and  a  fourth  as  merely 
a  farce.  If  asked  whether  "Troilus  and  Cressida" 
ought  to  be  grouped  with  the  tragedies  or  with  the 
comedies  or  with  the  histories,  he  might  answer  only 
with  a  shrug  of  the  shoulder. 

We  may  smile  at  the  long  list  which  Polonius  rattles 
off  glibly,  and  we  may  be  sure  that  Shakspere  meant 
us  to  smile  at  it ;  but  none  the  less  is  classification  the 
beginning  of  knowledge.  The  student  has  got  hold  of 
something  solid  when  he  finds  out  for  himself  what 
need  there  was  for  a  term  like  tragi-comedy  in  both 
England  and  France  in  the  seventeenth  century,  and 
why  the  eighteenth  century  saw  in  France  the  devel- 
opment of  the  comedie-larmoyante  (known  in  English 
as  sentimental -comedy),  and  of  the  tragedie-bourgeoise 
(known  in  German  as  tradesman 's-tragedy) .  He  has 
made  an  advance  in  knowledge  when  he  ascertains 
just  what  a  ballad-opera  is  and  a  musical-comedy,  an 
opera-comique  and  an  opera-bouffe,  and  when  he  can 
trace  the  influence  they  have  exerted  on  one  another. 
He  will  find  a  profit  in  grasping  the  exact  scope  of 
the  English  heroic-play,  and  the  Spanish  comedy-of- 
cloak-and-sword.  He  will  gain  if  he  keeps  clearly  in 
mind  a  working  definition  of  farce  and  of  melodrama, 
to  enable  him  to  perceive  more  swiftly  the  relation  of 
the  former  to  comedy,  and  of  the  latter  to  the  serious 
drama. 

Of  course,  it  is  needful  for  us  always  to  remember 
that  classification  is  a  means  only;  it  is  never  an  end 
in  itself.  It  is  useful  only  in  so  far  as  it  enables  us  to 
appreciate  the  exact  position  of  the  more  important 
plays  which  have  come  down  to  us  from  the  past,  and 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  125 

to  measure  the  value  of  the  more  important  of  the  plays 
which  are  now  proffered  to  us  in  the  present  day.  It 
is  a  constant  aid  to  the  apprehending  of  the  signifi- 
cant fact  that  the  development  of  the  drama  has  been 
continuous,  and  that  it  is  subject  to  laws  which  re- 
veal themselves  at  work  in  every  period.  Although  the 
past  and  the  present  may  seem  very  unlike,  they  have 
many  aspects  in  common;  and  therefore  it  is  an  ad- 
vantage to  the  critic  of  the  acted  drama  of  our  own 
time,  as  well  as  to  the  historian  of  the  dramatic  litera- 
ture of  other  centuries,  to  be  able  to  explain  the  one 
by  the  aid  of  the  other. 

The  likeness  of  certain  ancient  manifestations  of 
the  drama  to  certain  modern  manifestations  is  as  easy 
to  exaggerate  as  it  is  impossible  to  deny;  and  there  is 
no  occasion  to  give  undue  weight  to  the  suggestion 
that  the  lyrical-burlesque  of  the  Greeks  reveals  a  cer- 
tain similarity  to  the  nondescript  medley  made  famil- 
iar of  late  in  America  by  Messrs.  Weber  and  Fields, 
just  as  the  comedies  of  Plautus  show  a  certain  like- 
ness to  the  plays  of  tenement-house  life  in  New  York, 
put  together  by  Mr.  Edward  Harrigan.  So  in  Calde- 
ron's  day,  there  were  Spanish  analogues  to  the  modern 
swashbuckler  romanticist  pieces,  just  as  there  were, 
in  Shakspere's  time,  English  analogues  of  the  modern 
Bowery  melodrama.  The  precursor  of  the  problem- 
play  of  Ibsen  can  be  found  more  than  once  in  the  list 
of  Moliere's  works,  where  it  is  possible  also  to  dis- 
cover an  anticipation  of  our  latter-day  musical-comedy. 
And  for  a  final  illustration  of  these  survivals  of  form 
and  of  these  reincarnations  of  spirit,  take  the  comedy- 
of-humors,  which  Ben  Jonson  built  up  solidly  with 
his  imaginative  exaggerations,  and  set  it  by  the  side  of 


126  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

any  dramatization  of  a  loose-jointed  serial  story  by 
Dickens,  in  which  we  cannot  fail  to  find  the  same  vio- 
lent distortion  of  character  into  caricature.  A  drama- 
tization of  any  one  of  Dickens's  novels  can  hardly  help 
being  a  comedy-of -humors. 


The  French,  among  whom  the  critical  faculty  is 
more  acutely  developed  than  among  other  peoples, 
have  a  larger  vocabulary  of  critical  terms  than  there 
is  in  any  other  language;  and  they  have  devised  a 
classification  of  certain  of  the  effects  of  dialogue  which 
are  common  to  every  type  of  comic  play.  They  call 
a  jest  which  evokes  laughter  a  mot.,  and  they  make  a 
distinction  which  is  not  easy  to  render  in  English  be- 
tween mots  d'esprit,  mots  de  situation,  and  mots  de 
caractere.  The  mot  d'esprit  is  the  witticism,  pure  and 
simple,  existing  for  its  own  sake,  and  detachable  from 
its  context  —  like  the  remark  of  one  of  the  characters 
in  "  Lady  Windermere's  Fan  " : "  I  can  resist  everything 
—  except  temptation."  The  mot  de  situation  is  the 
phrase  which  is  funny,  solely  because  it  is  spoken  at 
that  particular  moment  in  the  setting  forth  of  the  story, 
like  the  "  What  the  devil  was  he  doing  in  that  galley  ?  " 
which  is  not  laughter-provoking  in  itself  and  apart 
from  the  incident  calling  it  forth,  but  which  arouses 
peals  of  merriment  in  its  proper  place  in  Moliere's 
"  Scapin."  And  the  mot  de  caractere  is  the  phrase 
which  makes  us  laugh  because  it  is  the  intense  ex- 
pression, at  the  moment,  of  the  individuality  of  the 
person  who  speaks  it  —  like  the  retort  of  the  wife 
to  her  sister  in  the  "Comedy  of  Errors,"  when  she 
has  been  roundly  abusing  her  husband.  Luciana 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  127 

satirically  comments  that  a  man  no  better  than  this 
is  no  great  loss  to  be  bewailed.  Whereupon  Adriana, 
smiling  through  her  tears,  returns :  "  Ah,  but  I  think 
him  better  than  I  say"  —  a  line  which  gets  its  laugh, 
of  course,  but  which  lingers  in  the  memory  as  a  sud- 
den revelation  of  the  underlying  character  of  the 
speaker. 

It  is  with  the  mot  d'esprit  that  we  must  class  the 
most  of  the  so-called  epigrams  which  glisten  on  the 
surface  of  the  dialogue.  They  are  mere  jokes,  smart 
sayings,  and  ingenious  aphorisms,  taken  out  of  a 
notebook  and  pinned  into  this  play  or  that,  as  appro- 
priate to  the  one  as  to  the  other.  They  offer  to  a  clever 
young  man  a  short  and  easy  way  to  attain  the  bril- 
liancy and  the  verbal  glitter  which  we  have  been  ac- 
customed to  expect  in  English  comedy,  since  the 
author  of  the  "Way  of  the  World"  sent  up  his  Con- 
greve  rockets.  They  delight  us  at  first,  even  though 
at  last  they  fatigue  us  a  little,  in  the  comedies  of 
Sheridan  and  in  the  comedies  of  Oscar  Wilde ;  and  yet 
neither  of  these  ingenious  dramatists  relied  for  suc- 
cess upon  this  superficial  flashing  of  brisk  witticisms, 
being  very  careful,  in  "Lady  Windermere's  Fan,"  as 
well  as  in  the  "  School  for  Scandal,"  to  construct  a 
solidly  framed  plot,  with  a  clearly  defined  struggle  of 
contending  desires,  to  sustain  the  interest  of  the  spec- 
tators. Underneath  the  crackling  of  artificial  wit,  there 
is  a  well-built  play,  the  story  of  which  would  please  in 
the  theater,  even  if  the  spoken  words  were  absolutely 
commonplace. 

This  device  of  sprinkling  detachable  witticisms 
throughout  the  dialogue  has  the  obvious  disadvantage 
that  it  forces  the  author  to  endow  his  empty-headed 


128  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

characters  with  his  own  alertness  of  intelligence.  For 
instance,  Mrs.  Malaprop's  blunders  are  far  too  felici- 
tous to  be  natural  in  the  mouth  of  a  lady  so  limited  in 
understanding;  and  the  elaborate  system  of  swearing 
expounded  by  Bob  Acres  is  far  too  clever  for  that  rather 
fat-witted  country  squire.  Sheridan,  who  had  not  only 
humor,  but  also  the  rarer  sense-of-humor,  did  not 
fail  to  detect  the  weakness  of  his  practice,  and  in  the 
"Critic,"  when  one  of  the  spectators  of  the  play, 
which  is  being  rehearsed  *  ventures  to  suggest  that  a 
certain  speech  is  rather  above  the  capacity  of  the 
character  who  had  just  delivered  it,  the  author  promptly 
retorts  that  he  is  "  not  for  making  slavish  distinctions, 
and  giving  all  the  fine  language  to  the  upper  sort  of 
people." 

The  temptation  to  attain  brilliancy  of  dialogue  by 
the  use  of  these  portable  witticisms  projected  into  the 
play  by  main  strength  is  one  wrhich  the  true  dramatist 
outgrows  as  he  gains  in  years.  It  was  in  their  youth 
that  Congreve  and  Sheridan  gave  their  comic  master- 
pieces to  the  stage.  It  was  in  his  youth  that  the  younger 
Dumas  displayed  the  facets  of  his  wit  in  the  "  Demi- 
Monde,"  which  bristles  with  obvious  mote  d'esprit, 
surface  adornments  lacking  in  the  "Francillon"  of 
his  maturer  years,  in  which  there  are  few  quotable 
phrases,  but  in  which  the  wit  is  incessant,  pervasive 
rather  than  paraded,  integral,  and  not  external.  This 
later  comedy  of  Dumas's  deserves  the  praise  which 
Mr.  William  Archer  once  bestowed  on  a  play  of  Bron- 
son  Howard's,  whereof  the  dialogue  abounded  in 
witty  speeches  which  belonged  there,  "like  blossoms 
on  a  laburnum,"  instead  of  being  stuck  on,  "like 
candles  on  a  Christmas  tree." 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  129 

VI 

Closely  akin  to  the  mot  d'esprit  are  the  longer  pas- 
sages, also  existing  for  their  own  sake,  and  enriching 
the  dialogue,  it  may  be,  but  not  serving  to  help  along 
the  action  of  the  play.  There  is  no  logical  necessity 
for  Jaques  to  set  forth  the  seven  ages  of  man,  or  for 
Touchstone  to  nominate  in  order  the  seven  degrees  of 
the  lie.  Even  though  we  cannot  wish  either  of  these 
speeches  away,  we  cannot  deny  that  the  one,  as  well 
as  the  other,  is  an  excursus.  Touchstone's  explanation 
seems  doubly  out  of  place,  in  that  it  is  inserted  in  the 
last  scene  of  all,  when  the  comedy  is  hastening  toward 
its  happy  end.  Perhaps  it  was  written  to  fatten  the 
clown's  part,  and  perhaps  it  was  put  precisely  where 
it  is  to  give  Rosalind  time  to  change  from  the  boyish 
costume  of  Ganymede  into  the  ampler  habiliments  of 
her  own  sex.  Jaques 's  cynical  denunciation  of  his  fel* 
low-man  can  easily  be  defended,  it  is  only  fair  to  note, 
by  the  plea  that  it  is  the  completest  revelation  of  its 
speaker's  character ;  in  other  words,  that  it  is  in  fact  to 
be  classed  not  only  with  mots  d 'esprit  but  also  with  mots 
de  caractere.  And  a  like  defense  might  be  proffered 
for  the  hunting  speech  of  Lady  Gay  Spanker  in  "  Lon- 
don Assurance,"  a  highly  artificial  tirade. 

But  every  one  of  these  glittering  passages  bears  a 
striking  likeness  to  a  tenor  or  soprano  solo  in  Italian 
opera,  devised  to  exhibit  the  accomplishments  of  the 
performer  rather  than  to  contribute  to  the  rounding 
out  of  the  play.  Such  bravura  passages  are  common 
also  in  later  Roman  tragedy,  when  the  dramatic  poet 
steps  aside  for  a  moment  to  air  his  eloquence  at  greater 
length  than  is  necessary.  This  is  one  of  the  vulnerable 
spots  in  the  armor  of  the  dramatists,  pierced  by  the  keen 


130  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

wit  of  the  authors  of  the  "Rehearsal,"  the  attack  on 
Dryden  (the  framework  of  which  Sheridan  borrowed 
when  he  wrote  the  "  Critic  ") .  When  one  of  the  by- 
standers remarks  that  a  certain  passage  in  the  piece 
that  is  being  rehearsed  is  "  not  to  the  purpose,  for  the 
play  does  not  go  on,"  since  "the  plot  stands  still,"  the 
irritable  author  promptly  retorts  with  the  unanswer- 
able query:  "What  is  the  plot  good  for  but  to  bring  in 
fine  things?"  It  deserves  to  be  noted  that  Shakspere, 
who  indulges  freely  in  these  pleasant  digressions  in  his 
comedies,  is  chary  of  them  in  his  tragedies,  as  though 
the  severer  tragic  mold  forced  him  to  strive  for  the 
loftiest  standard,  such  as  he  found  no  need  to  impose 
on  himself  in  comedy,  which  seemed  to  him  a  form 
looser  and  less  clearly  defined. 

The  mot  de  situation  is  far  more  valuable  to  the  play- 
wright and  far  more  mirth-provoking  to  the  audience 
than  the  mot  d'esprit.  But  it  is  less  easy  to  illustrate 
because  it  is  part  and  parcel  of  the  story  of  the  play, 
and  it  is  therefore  not  quotable  without  an  explanation 
of  the  incident  which  evokes  it.  As  good  an  example 
as  any  is  the  "sister,  sister,  every  way"  of  Congreve 
in  "  Love  for  Love,"  which  owes  its  point  to  the  attempt 
of  Mrs.  Foresight  to  corner  Mrs.  Frail  by  producing 
unexpectedly  a  gold  bodkin  and  by  asking  where  the 
other  lost  it;  "oh,  sister,  sister!"  Taken  aback  for  a 
moment,  Mrs.  Frail  collects  her  wits  quickly  and  re- 
torts :  "  If  you  go  to  that,  sister,  where  did  you  find  this 
bodkin?  Oh,  sister,  sister,  every  way!"  But  the  great 
master  of  the  mot  de  situation  is  Moliere,  who  always 
scornfully  refrained  from  the  easier  mot  d'esprit.  With- 
out descending  to  the  mechanical  trick  of  the  catch- 
word, Moliere  more  than  once  redoubles  the  effect 


A  CHAPTER  OF  DEFINITIONS  131 

of  a  mot  de  situation  by  carefully  calculated  repetition. 
And  the  trick  of  the  catchword,  mechanical  as  it  is, 
can  be  varied  adroitly.  In  "  Lady  Windermere's  Fan," 
for  example,  a  young  girl,  whom  we  see  taking  part 
in  the  general  conversation,  and  after  a  while  wooed 
and  finally  engaged  to  be  married,  is  never  heard  to 
say  anything  except  "Yes,  mamma." 

As  for  the  mots  de  caractere,  there  is  no  need  to  say 
much,  for  examples  will  spring  swiftly  to  the  minds 
of  all  lovers  of  Moliere  and  of  Shakspere.  Falstaff 
abounds  in  them :  "  I  think  the  devil  will  not  have  me 
damned,  lest  the  oil  that  is  in  me  should  set  hell  on 
fire,"  which  is  a  mot  d'esprit  as  well  as  a  mot  de  carac- 
tere. Indeed,  it  would  not  be  difficult  to  pick  speeches 
out  of  Falstaff's  which  combine  the  merits  of  the  mot 
d'esprit,  the  mot  de  situation,  and  the  mot  de  caractere. 
And  the  characteristics  of  all  three  types  are  united  also 
in  the  speech  of  Sir  Peter  to  his  wife  in  one  of  the 
famous  quarrel  scenes  of  the  "School  for  Scandal," 
when  Lady  Teazle  says:  "I  should  think  you  would 
like  to  have  your  wife  thought  a  woman  of  taste"; 
and  the  husband  explosively  retorts :  "  Taste !  Zounds ! 
madam,  you  had  no  taste  when  you  married  me!" 


CHAPTER  VII 

TRADITIONS    AND    CONVENTIONS 

Tragedy  or  comedy,  every  stage-play  is,  in  a  certain  sense,  only 
a  tissue  of  conventions.  It  is  a  convention  to  compact  into  a  few 
hours  of  time  the  whole  drama  of  an  existence  or  the  duration  of  the 
catastrophe  which  historically  brought  it  to  an  end;  it  is  a  conven- 
tion to  lend  to  the  persons  of  this  play  the  language  of  verse  or  even 
that  of  a  prose  which  is  generally  neither  their  maternal  tongue  nor 
the  speech  of  their  condition.  —  F.  BRUNETI^RE,  Histoire  de  la 
litterature  franpaise  classique. 


As  the  dramatist  writes  for  the  theater  of  his  own  time, 
he  begins  always  by  accepting  the  theatrical  traditions 
which  he  finds  established,  and  as  he  seeks  to  interest 
the  spectators,  he  has  no  hesitation  in  utilizing  the  con- 
ventions which  he  finds  in  favor  with  his  audiences. 
Art  exists  only  when  the  artist  in  his  search  for  truth 
is  allowed  to  depart  from  the  mere  facts  of  life.  Paint- 
ing "steals  but  a  glance  of  time,"  and  represents  as 
motionless  that  which  we  know  to  be  vibrating  with 
movement.  Sculpture  is  not  only  motionless,  it  is  also 
monochrome ;  and  the  sculptor  transmutes  into  the  uni- 
formity of  marble  or  bronze  the  varied  hues  of  the  hu- 
man figure  and  sometimes  even  the  variegated  tints  of 
customary  costume.  To  deny  to  the  painter  or  to  the 
sculptor  the  privilege  of  thus  ignoring  the  accidental 
facts  of  life,  is  to  refuse  him  the  right  to  delight  us  with 
his  work.  Strictly  speaking,  of  course,  the  immobility 
of  a  picture  or  of  a  statue  is  not  "natural";  but  unless 


TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS        133 

we  grant  at  once  this  departure  from  nature,  we  deny 
ourselves  the  enjoyment  of  painting  and  of  sculpture. 
Underlying  every  one  of  the  arts,  there  is  a  kindred  de- 
parture from  "  nature,"  which  we  must  tolerate  before 
we  can  give  ourselves  up  to  the  pleasure  which  that  art 
offers  us.  Even  in  the  primitive  ballad,  we  find  the  char- 
acters talking  in  rime,  which  was  never  the  practice 
of  mortal  man.  But  we  like  rime,  in  its  proper  place, 
and  we  gladly  allow  the  lyrist  to  assume  that  he  is  set- 
ting before  us  beings  who  are  wont  to  express  them- 
selves in  rime  as  well  as  in  meter. 

A  convention  is  thus  seen  to  be  a  denial  of  the  actual 
fact,  known  to  us  all,  a  denial  which  we  permit  for 
our  own  profit.  In  most  of  the  arts,  we  have  accepted 
these  necessary  conventions  so  completely  that  we  are 
wholly  unconscious  that  they  authorize  the  artist  to  be 
"unnatural."  We  are  so  constituted  that  what  is  fa- 
miliar tends  to  be  received  as  right  and  proper  —  in  a 
word,  as  rational.  But  what  is  familiar  to  us  is  not 
necessarily  familiar  to  others;  and  the  American  In- 
dians, when  they  first  saw  a  portrait  in  profile,  used 
to  ask  where  the  other  side  of  the  face  was,  —  a  ques- 
tion which  would  never  occur  to  any  of  us,  accustomed 
as  we  are  to  frequent  the  picture  galleries.  Indeed, 
we  are  so  familiar  with  the  art  of  the  draftsman  that  we 
recognize  a  portrait  in  black  ink  on  white  paper,  or  in 
white  chalk  on  a  blackboard,  although  we  have  none  of 
us  either  a  black  or  a  white  line  around  our  faces. 

The  conventions  which  underlie  each  of  the  arts  are 
permanent,  for  without  them  the  art  could  not  exist. 
They  are  tacit  agreements  between  the  artist  and  the 
public  that  if  he  shall  be  authorized  to  ignore  certain 
of  the  mere  facts,  he  will  do  his  best  to  present  the  truth 


134  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

as  he  sees  it.  A  convention  is  an  implied  contract  be- 
tween two  parties;  and  neither  party  has  a  right  to 
violate  the  conditions  of  the  treaty.  It  is  the  convention 
of  opera,  for  instance,  that  there  exists  a  race  of  human 
beings,  whose  natural  speech  is  song;  and  the  opera- 
goer  has  no  right,  therefore,  to  object  to  the  death- 
song  of  Tristan  on  the  ground  that  a  dying  man  would 
not  have  the  physical  strength  to  sing  for  half  an  hour 
on  his  death-bed.  It  is  the  refusal  of  Tolstoy  to  abide 
by  this  implicit  contract  which  invalidates  his  con- 
temptuous attack  on  the  opera.  So  the  convention 
which  underlies  pantomime  is  that  there  exists  a  race 
of  human  beings,  whose  natural  speech  is  gesture,  and 
who  are  able  to  employ  it  to  express  all  those  emotions 
which  the  rest  of  us  would  translate  into  spoken  words. 
To  be  willing  to  accept  this  contract  is  a  condition 
precedent  to  our  enjoyment  of  pantomime.  We  may, 
if  we  choose,  refuse  to  be  parties  to  this  agreement; 
but  then  there  is  nothing  for  us  to  do  but  to  keep  out 
of  the  theater  whenever  a  pantomime  is  represented, 
as  Tolstoy  should  have  kept  away  when  an  opera  was 
performed. 

Besides  these  permanent  conventions  which  are  the 
basis  of  each  of  the  several  arts,  we  can  discern  others 
which  are  temporary  and  accidental,  accepted  in  only 
certain  places  and  only  for  certain  periods,  but  not 
prerequisite  to  the  existence  of  the  art.  For  example, 
in  the  wall-paintings  of  the  royal  tombs  of  Egypt, 
men  are  depicted  in  ruddy  brown  and  women  in  pale 
yellow,  while  the  Pharaoh  is  always  very  much  larger 
in  proportion  than  are  his  subjects.  So  in  the  Pom- 
peian  pictures  of  mythological  themes,  the  less  impor- 
tant figures  are  painted  upon  a  smaller  scale.  Tern- 


TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS        135 

porary  conventions  of  this  sort  are  due  sometimes  to 
special  conditions.  A  sculptor  who  intends  to  repro- 
duce his  clay  model  in  bronze  can  rely  upon  the  firm 
'supports  to  be  concealed  inside  that  metal;  but  if  he 
expects  to  make  a  statue  of  marble  he  has  to  intro- 
duce something,  a  falling  drapery  or  an  arbitrary 
column,  which  will  add  strength  to  the  ankles,  where 
the  marble  would  be  most  fragile.  There  are  even 
Roman  sculptures,  in  which  the  body  of  a  horse  is 
frankly  sustained  by  a  wholly  impossible  trunk  of  a 
tree  projecting  up  from  the  ground  into  the  belly  of 
the  animal. 

ii 

The  drama,  being  an  art,  has  its  necessary  conven- 
tions, like  all  the  other  arts ;  and  it  has  also  its  tempo- 
rary and  accidental  conventions,  often  due  to  special 
circumstances  of  a  particular  theater.  The  necessary 
conventions  of  the  drama  are  the  result  of  three  con- 
ditions of  theatrical  performance.  The  first  of  these  is 
that  the  dramatist  has  at  his  disposal  only  a  limited 
time  —  two  or  three  hours  at  the  most ;  and  he  is  there- 
fore compelled  to  select  rigorously  the  vital  elements 
of  his  theme  and  to  compact  his  dialogue  out  of  all 
resemblance  to  the  ample  and  repetitious  speech  of 
ordinary  life.  The  second  and  the  third  are  the  obli- 
gation so  to  handle  his  story  that  everything  done  on 
the  stage  can  be  seen  by  the  spectators  in  the  theater, 
and  that  everything  said  on  the  stage  can  be  heard  by 
the  audience.  The  playgoer  wants  to  have  as  much 
as  possible  packed  into  the  "  two  hours'  traffic  of  the 
stage";  he  wants  also  to  see  everything  and  to  hear 
everything;  and  he  is  therefore  ready  to  grant  to  the 


II 
136  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

playwrights  every  privilege  which  will  help  them  to 
give  him  what  he  wants. 

First  of  all,  of  course,  he  insists  on  understanding 
the  story ;  and  therefore  the  dramatists  always  employ 
the  language  which  they  and  the  spectators  have  in 
common.  This  is  so  needful  that  we  take  it  for  granted ; 
and  yet  it  is  not  "natural"  that  the  Persians  in  the 
tragedy  of  JSschylus  should  speak  Greek,  that  Julius 
Caesar  and  Hamlet  and  Romeo  should  speak  English 
and  not  Latin  and  Danish  and  Italian;  and  that  the 
Cid  of  Corneille  and  the  Don  Juan  of  Moliere  should 
speak  French.  In  "  Henry  V,"  Shakspere  pushes  this 
convention  still  further;  the  English  characters  speak 
English,  of  course,  and  so  also  of  course  do  the  French 
characters  among  themselves  —  except  in  one  scene; 
but  when  Henry  V  is  wooing  Katherine,  she  uses  the 
hesitating  broken  English  of  a  learner  of  our  tongue. 

It  is  true  that  condensation  is  also  necessary  in  the 
dialogue  of  prose-fiction,  a  rigorous  selection  of  signifi- 
cant remarks.  The  most  realistic  novelist,  striving  to 
echo  the  accent  of  contemporary  triviality,  has  never 
dared  to  let  his  characters  discourse  at  one  half  the 
length  to  which  their  chatter  would  run  in  real  life. 
The  pressure  of  time  forces  the  playwright  to  compact 
his  dialogue  to  an  extent  never  dreamed  of  by  the 
novelist.  This  is  one  reason  why  the  dramatizer  of 
a  novel  has  to  rewrite  its  dialogue  in  conformity  with 
the  different  scale  demanded  by  the  theater.  On  the 
stage,  a  love-scene  of  supreme  importance  may  be  so 
artfully  condensed  that  it  does  not  last  more  than  five 
minutes,  although  in  real  life  it  might  have  taken  at 
least  one  hour. 

Not  only  does  the  dramatist  condense  the  speech 


TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS        137 

of  his  characters,  but  he  clarifies  it  also.  Every  per- 
son in  a  play  is  supposed  to  be  capable  of  saying  just 
what  he  means  the  first  time  of  trying,  and  in  the  few- 
est possible  words ;  and  this  is  a  very  violent  departure 
from  the  practice  of  everyday  life,  where  our  speech 
is  uncertain,  halting,  and  ragged.  Every  character  also 
uses  the  best  possible  words  to  voice  his  thought,  and 
every  other  character  immediately  takes  his  meaning 
without  hesitancy;  and  this  is  again  a  variation  from 
the  fact,  since  we  are  continually  failing  to  catch  the 
exact  intent  of  those  with  whom  we  are  talking. 
Praise  is  abundant  for  the  verisimilitude  of  the  dia- 
logue of  Ibsen's  social  dramas  and  for  the  skill  with 
which  Ibsen  has  given  to  every  one  of  his  characters 
the  actual  vocabulary  which  that  character  would 
use.  Yet  his  compact  and  polished  prose  rests  as 
frankly  on  a  convention  as  the  song  of  the  operatic 
hero  or  as  the  all-sufficient  gesture  of  the  pantomimist. 
The  convention  underlying  Shakspere's  tragedy  is 
that  the  characters  belong  to  a  race  of  human  beings 
whose  habitual  speech  is  blank  verse,  the  unrimed 
decasyllabic  iambic.  Yet  in  some  of  his  earlier  plays, 
Shakspere  varies  from  this  convention,  frequently 
dropping  into  rime,  while  in  certain  of  his  other  plays, 
notably  in  "  Julius  Caesar,"  he  makes  another  depar- 
ture, and  we  find  the  heroic  figures  employing  blank 
verse,  the  less  distinguished  characters  using  a  stately 
rhythmic  prose,  while  the  populace  appropriately 
sinks  into  the  every-day  speech  of  the  common  folk. 
The  corresponding  convention  underlying  the  trage- 
dies of  Corneille  and  Racine  and  the  comedies  of 
Moliere  is  that  the  characters  belong  to  a  race  of  be- 
ings whose  habitual  speech  is  the  alexandrine,  with 


138  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

alternating  couplets  of  masculine  and  feminine  rimes. 
As  we  who  speak  English  are  used*  to  blank  verse, 
Shakspere's  lines  seem  to  us  "  natural  " ;  and  as  we 
are  not  accustomed  to  hear  rime  on  the  stage,  Cor- 
neille's  lines  often  seem  to  us  "unnatural."  But  both 
are  departures  from  the  actual  facts  of  human  speech ; 
each  is  a  convention  accepted  willingly  by  the  com- 
patriots of  the  author.  So  in  the  Spanish  drama,  we 
find  asonantes  relieved  by  an  occasional  sonnet,  with 
its  complicated  metrical  construction.  But  this  is 
scarcely  a  bolder  contradiction  of  the  mere  facts  of  life 
than  the  convention  which  obtains  in  the  comedies 
of  Congreve  and  of  Sheridan,  where  all  the  characters, 
even  illiterate  servants,  are  endowed  with  the  keen  and 
finished  wit  of  the  author. 

in 

It  is  imperative  that  we  should  approve  of  the  essen- 
tial conventions  of  the  drama,  or  we  must  deny  our- 
selves the  pleasure  of  the  theater.  We  may  not  even 
be  aware  that  they  are  conventions,  but  we  permit 
them  none  the  less.  Almost  any  non-essential  con- 
vention we  are  willing  also  to  accept,  if  its  acceptance 
is  helpful,  even  though  it  contradicts  all  our  habits. 
We  moderns  are  accustomed  now  to  realistic  scenery 
and  characteristic  costumes  in  the  theater;  the  Greeks 
of  old  and  the  Elizabethans  after  them  had  the  full 
pleasure  of  the  drama  without  these  accompaniments. 
And  yet  we  are  willing  enough  to  get  along  without 
either  of  these  accompaniments,  if  the  bargain  is 
frankly  presented  to  us  beforehand.  Henry  Irving 
once  performed  the  "Merchant  of  Venice"  at  West 
Point  in  the  mess-hall,  on  a  platform  draped  with 


TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS        139 

flags,  without  any  scenery;  and  Edwin  Booth  once 
gave  "Hamlet"  at  Waterbury,  the  whole  company 
appearing  in  their  traveling  clothes,  because  their 
stage-costumes  had  miscarried.  In  both  cases,  the 
spectators  were  warned  in  advance;  they  knew  what 
to  expect  and  they  speedily  adjusted  themselves  to  the 
novel  conditions.  Moliere's  "Misanthrope"  was  once 
performed  before  Louis  XIV  in  the  marble  court  of 
Versailles  without  any  attempt  at  an  appropriate  back- 
ground. 

In  a  play,  all  the  details  of  action  and  of  speech  must 
be  significant,  or  else  the  playgoer  is  misled  and  his 
interest  distracted.  He  wants  to  see  everything  that  is 
done;  and  therefore  the  fourth  wall  of  every  room 
is  removed,  so  that  he  can  behold  what  takes  place  on 
the  stage.  He  wants  to  hear  everything  that  is  said ; 
and  therefore  a  character  whispering  a  sharp  warning 
to  another  character,  in  the  presence  of  a  third,  so 
pitches  his  voice  that  it  carries  to  the  back  of  the 
auditorium,  although  it  is  supposed  to  be  inaudible 
to  a  third  character  only  a  few  feet  distant. 

In  the  English  playhouses  of  the  eighteenth  century 
and  of  the  early  nineteenth,  the  most  important  epi- 
sodes of  a  play  were  acted  in  the  "focus"  close  to  the 
pit,  and  remote  from  the  scenery,  for  it  was  only  here 
that  there  was  light  enough  for  the  spectators  to  see 
the  changing  expression  on  the  faces  of  the  actors. 
This  was  a  convention  then  acceptable  to  the  play- 
goer, since  it  increased  his  pleasure;  but  it  is  unac- 
ceptable in  our  smaller  theaters  wherein  the  electric 
light  illuminates  every  part  of  the  stage.  To-day  we 
expect  an  actor  to  remain  "  in  the  picture."  Acting  in 
the  focus  was  a  temporary  convention  due  to  temporary 


140  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

conditions;  and  when  these  conditions  ceased,  the  con- 
vention was  no  longer  tolerable,  although  it  survived 
the  conditions  out  of  which  it  arose.  We  are  still  will- 
ing that  the  lilting  lyric  trolled  by  Rosalind  in  the 
Forest  of  Arden  shall  be  accompanied  by  the  full 
orchestra  of  the  theater ;  the  arrant  absurdity  of  this 
does  not  annoy  us,  partly  because  we  are  used  to  it, 
and  partly  because  we  prefer  it. 

But  we  should  resent  immediately  any  similar  ab- 
surdity to  which  we  were  not  accustomed.  It  is  a  little 
difficult  for  us  to  understand  how  it  was  that  the  mass- 
ing of  spectators  on  the  right  and  left  of  the  stage  when 
Shakspere's  and  Moliere's  plays  were  first  acted, 
did  not  interfere  with  the  verisimilitude  of  the  per- 
formance. This  is  a  state  of  affairs  which  would  strike 
us  now  as  very  strange,  although  it  seemed  natural 
enough  then  to  the  rest  of  the  audience,  as  they  were 
used  to  it  and  knew  no  other  device.  These  spectators 
on  the  stage  were  supposed  not  to  be  there,  and  there- 
fore they  did  not  interfere  with  the  pleasure  of  the 
others.  A  similar  convention  still  exists  in  the  Japanese 
theater.  One  American  visitor  to  the  playhouse  in  Tokio 
has  recorded  his  impressions  of  the  performance  with 
significant  analysis  of  the  ultimate  effect :  — 

"  The  prompter  sat  on  the  stage  in  view  of  the  audi- 
ence, and  the  fact  that  he  was  dressed  in  a  skin-tight  suit 
of  black  with  a  black  hood,  like  a  chimney  sweep  or  a 
goblin,  and  that  he  kept  his  face  always  from  the  specta- 
tors, was  supposed  to  render  him  invisible.  Another  black 
imp  remained  on  the  scene  to  act  as  dresser  and  stage 
manager.  It  was  his  duty  to  assist  an  actor  in  making  any 
alteration  in  his  costume,  and  to  carry  away  any  prop  that 
had  been  used :  a  letter,  fan,  or  tea-tray.  If  he  thought  an 


TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS         141 

actor's  sash  was  not  properly  fastened,  he  would  creep  up 
behind  him,  even  though  the  actor  were  speaking,  and  tie 
it  properly.  We  were  not  supposed  to  see  him  do  this. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  it  was  curious  how  soon  one  failed  to 
note  his  presence." 

Just  as  the  Japanese  attendants  in  black  are  sup- 
posed to  be  invisible,  like  the  spectators  on  the  English 
stage,  so  we  can  find  analogues  to  Shakspere's  medley 
of  prose  and  verse  in  the  classic  Sanskrit  drama,  in 
which  the  heroes  speak  the  nobler  Sanskrit,  while  the 
women  and  the  servants  are  allowed  only  the  humbler 
Pali.  In  the  medieval  Portuguese  passion-plays,  the 
devil  often  spoke  Spanish;  and  in  the  more  modern 
pieces  written  for  the  east  side  Jewish  theaters  of  New 
York,  it  is  only  the  broadly  comic  characters  who  are 
frankly  Yiddish  in  their  vocabulary. 

It  is  not  easy  always  to  distinguish  between  a  con- 
vention and  a  tradition.  Strictly  speaking,  a  conven- 
tion is  a  departure  from  the  fact  in  order  to  give  the 
spectator  something  he  would  otherwise  have  to  forego. 
A  tradition  is  an  accepted  way  of  doing  things,  which 
may  or  may  not  be  completely  "natural."  Conven- 
tions are  all  traditions,  but  not  all  traditions  are  con- 
ventions. In  the  Latin  drama,  we  find  a  tradition  taken 
over  from  the  Greek  drama,  the  frequent  employment 
of  an  intriguing  slave,  who  plots  for  his  master's  bene- 
fit. This  scheming  servant  may  be  truthfully  portrayed 
along  the  traditional  lines;  but  when  he  reappears  in 
Moliere,  he  has  no  longer  any  relation  to  real  life ;  he 
stands  forth  as  a  tradition  which  has  become  a  conven- 
tion. In  the  Greek  drama,  again,  we  find  the  "  recogni- 
tions" which  Aristotle  discussed,  such  as  the  sudden 
discovery  by  parents  of  long-lost  children.  Now,  in 


142  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

Greece,  where  there  was  ever  intermittent  war  and 
casual  piracy,  children  were  captured  and  sold  as 
slaves ;  and  it  was  always  possible  that  they  might  be 
restored  to  their  parents  at  the  end  of  the  play.  But 
when  the  Latin  drama  took  over  this  tradition  of  the 
Greek  drama,  it  became  only  a  convention,  since  the 
conditions  of  life  had  changed  and  there  was  little 
likelihood  that  sons  might  be  sold  into  slavery  and 
bought  by  their  own  fathers,  as  in  the  "Captives"  of 
Plautus.  And  when  this  Greek  tradition,  which  had 
hardened  into  a  convention  in  Rome,  is  transplanted 
into  Italian  comedy  and  into  French,  its  convention- 
ality is  seen  to  be  flagrant,  —  a  fact  which  did  not 
prevent  Moliere  from  employing  it. 

When  Moliere  borrows  plots  from  the  Italians,  he 
is  forced  to  make  a  convention  out  of  another  tradi- 
tion. In  Southern  Italy,  where  the  comedy-of-masks 
flourished,  people  live  out  of  doors;  and  the  traditional 
scene  of  the  Italian  improvised  play  is  a  public  square, 
in  which  all  the  characters  meet  to  talk  about  their 
private  affairs.  But  when  Moliere  transplanted  this 
tradition  to  Paris,  where  the  climate  is  colder  and 
damper,  and  where  business  is  transacted  indoors, 
when  he  represented  M.  de  Pourceaugnac  and  the 
two  doctors  sitting  down  for  their  comic  consultation, 
in  chairs  set  out  in  the  street,  he  was  obviously  trans- 
forming the  Italian  tradition  into  a  mere  convention. 

The  traditions  of  the  medieval  stage  survived  for 
a  long  while,  and  they  are  visible  abundantly  in  Shak- 
spere's  plays  and  even  in  the  earlier  pieces  of  Corneille. 
In  our  modern  theaters,  the  changes  of  scenery  are 
consecutive;  the  scene  of  the  second  act  may  be  dif- 
ferent from  that  of  the  first  act,  and  the  later  acts  may 


TRADITIONS  AND   CONVENTIONS        143 

each  have  its  own  set.  But  on  the  medieval  stage, 
especially  in  France,  the  traditions  of  the  earliest  per- 
formance of  the  passion-play  in  the  church  had  led 
to  a  wholly  different  arrangement.  In  the  church,  the 
several  episodes  were  acted  in  several  places,  each  of 
which  was  known  as  a  "  station  "  ;  and  in  France,  when 
the  mystery  was  thrust  out  of  the  church,  these  sta- 
tions were  all  erected  in  one  long  line  at  the  back  of 
the  platform  on  which  the  performance  took  place, 
and  they  were  known  as  "  mansions."  Thus  it  was  that 
the  French  theater  came  to  have  the  "simultaneous 
set,"  all  the  places  needed  in  the  action  being  then  in 
sight  at  once,  not  displayed  consecutively,  as  is  the 
custom  to-day.  It  is  this  tradition  of  bringing  together 
places  actually  remote,  which  Shakspere  follows  in 
"  Richard  III,"  when  he  sets  on  the  stage  at  the  same 
time  the  tent  of  Richard  and  the  tent  of  Richmond. 
Probably  these  tents  were  represented  in  the  Globe 
Theater  only  by  a  looping  back  (at  the  extreme  right 
and  at  the  extreme  left)  of  the  tapestry  pendant  from 
the  upper  gallery.  When  Corneille  adapted  the  "Cid" 
from  the  Spanish,  he  employed  this  simultaneous  set, 
erecting  on  the  stage  the  mansions  required  for  his  plot, 
and  letting  the  stage  itself  serve  as  a  neutral  ground 
where  all  the  characters  might  meet  as  they  entered 
each  from  his  own  dwelling.  This  was  absolutely  in 
accord  with  the  medieval  tradition. 


Of  all  the  conventions  of  the  drama,  none  has  a  more 
interesting  history  than  the  soliloquy,  the  speech  in 
which  a  character  talks  aloud,  not  to  any  person  on  the 
stage  with  him,  but  directly  to  the  audience.  And  one 


144  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

of  the  most  striking  changes  which  have  taken  place 
in  the  drama  of  our  own  time  is  the  sudden  disap- 
pearance of  the  soliloquy.  In  the  final  decades  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  the  leading  playwrights  of  every 
modern  language  began  to  display  a  distaste  for  this 
monologue,  with  Ibsen  setting  the  example  of  renuncia- 
tion. Time  was,  and  not  so  long  ago,  when  the  play- 
wright found  it  very  convenient  to  have  the  villain  lay 
aside  his  mask  and  bare  his  black  soul  in  a  speech  to 
himself.  But  now  this  device,  convenient  as  it  may  be, 
is  discarded.  No  longer  does  a  character  come  down, 
to  the  footlights  for  a  confidential  communication  to 
the  audience,  telling  them  his  thoughts,  declaring  his 
intentions,  and  defending  his  acts.  So  sharp  is  the 
reaction  against  the  practice,  that  the  French  writer 
of  a  eulogistic  study  of  the  later  German  naturalistic 
dramatists,  after  praising  the  technic  of  Hauptmann, 
asserts  positively  that  the  soliloquy  and  the  aside  are 
hereafter  banished  from  the  stage. 

Yet  this  abandonment  of  these  conventions,  how- 
ever complete  it  may  seem  now,  is  very  recent  indeed. 
Ibsen  made  a  frank  use  of  these  devices  in  his  earlier 
dramas.  In  Sudermann's  "Honor,"  one  character, 
Trast,  talks  aloud  to  himself,  and  then  still  soliloquiz- 
ing, rebukes  himself  for  talking  aloud.  In  Mr.  Henry 
Arthur  Jones's  "Middleman,"  the  soliloquy  and  the 
aside  are  used  without  question,  and  with  no  anticipa- 
tion that  they  were  so  soon  to  fall  out  of  fashion.  In 
these  modern  plays,  they  are  employed  as  they  had 
been  utilized  in  the  medieval  drama,  as  well  as  in  the 
tragedies  and  comedies  of  the  Greeks  and  Romans. 

Perhaps  the  French  writer  on  the  German  drama  is 
justified  in  believing  that  the  doom  of  the  soliloquy  is 


TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS        145 

sealed  and  that  the  sentence  of  banishment  has  been 
pronounced  on  the  aside.  But  his  dislike  for  them 
expressed  in  1905  is  diametrically  opposed  to  the  lik- 
ing confessed  in  1684  by  the  English  translator  of 
the  Abbe  d'Aubignac's  "Pratique  du  Theatre."  The 
translation  is  ingenuously  entitled  "  The  Whole  Art  of 
the  Stage,  containing  not  only  the  Rules  of  the  Dra- 
matick  Art,  but  many  curious  Observations  about  it" ; 
and  one  of  these  curious  observations  is  the  confession 
"  that  it  is  sometimes  very  pleasant  to  see  a  man  upon 
the  Stage  lay  open  his  heart  and  speak  boldly  of  his 
most  secret  thoughts,  explain  his  designs,  and  give  a 
vent  to  all  that  his  passion  suggests."  The  French  au- 
thor had  deduced  his  principles  of  the  dramaturgic  art, 
partly  from  the  practice  of  the  ancients,  and  partly 
from  his  own  examination  of  what  gave  pleasure  to  a 
French  audience  in  the  days  of  Louis  XIV.  He  had 
noted  that  the  soul-unveiling  soliloquy  was  welcome 
in  the  dramas  of  his  own  contemporaries,  and  he  had 
discovered  it  to  be  freely  employed  in  the  plays  of 
Plautus  also.  And  for  two  centuries  or  more,  this  con- 
vention was  found  convenient  by  the  composer  of  plays 
and  acceptable  to  the  audience.  Then,  in  the  final  years 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  we  observe  the  dramatists 
discarding  it  hastily,  and  the  spectators  crying  out 
against  an  outworn  trick  unworthy  of  a  self-respecting 
workman.  Why  this  unexpected  change  of  attitude 
on  the  part  of  playwright  and  playgoer  alike?  What 
had  happened  to  open  their  eyes  to  the  obvious  fact 
that  the  soliloquy  was  "  unnatural "  ?  Now,  to  find  the 
answer  to  these  questions  we  need  to  take  a  long  glance 
back  over  the  history  of  the  theater.  As  the  drama  of 
the  Greeks  was  an  outgrowth  of  their  song,  we  might 


146  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

expect  to  observe  in  their  plays  a  freedom  of  lyric  self- 
expression;  and  in  JSschylus,  for  example,  we  hear 
the  bound  Prometheus  proclaim  his  woes  to  the  wintry 
sky,  before  the  winged  chariot  brings  the  daughters 
of  ocean  to  comfort  his  windy  solitude.  Even  in  Sopho- 
cles, certain  of  the  longer  speeches  of  the  chief  char- 
acters, although  delivered  after  the  chorus  has  circled 
into  the  orchestra,  are  rather  spoken  at  large  than 
addressed  directly  to  this  band  of  courteous  listeners. 
In  the  classicist  tragedy  of  the  French,  the  chorus  has 
shrunk  to  a  single  attendant  for  each  of  the  chief  fig- 
ures. Thus  in  Racine's  masterpiece,  Phedre  is  ever 
accompanied  by  CEnone,  Aricie  by  Ismene,  and  Hip- 
poly  te  by  Theramene,  and  to  these  they  can  unbosom 
themselves  freely,  the  wily  poet  thus  avoiding  the  sem- 
blance of  the  soliloquy  while  profiting  by  all  its  ad- 
vantages. These  confidants  are  colorless  creatures, 
sketched  in  vague  outline  only  and  existing  for  the 
sole  purpose  of  being  talked  to.  Mere  shadows  of  their 
masters  and  mistresses,  they  share  the  same  fate ;  and 
in  the  tragedy  which  is  rehearsed  in  Sheridan's  "  Critic," 
where  the  heroine  goes  mad  in  white  satin,  the  con- 
fidant unhesitatingly  goes  mad  in  white  muslin.  The 
confidant  was  one  of  the  outward  and  visible  signs 
which  excited  the  special  detestation  of  the  ardent 
romanticists  of  1830.  Victor  Hugo  dismissed  these 
pale  figures  from  his  dramas ;  and  the  exuberant  lyrist 
was  thereby  driven  back  to  the  soliloquy.  The  argu- 
mentative monologue  which  he  bestowed  on  the  king 
in  "Hernani"  is  one  of  the  longest  soliloquies  discov- 
erable in  all  dramatic  literature.  This  introspective 
oration  is  a  superb  specimen  of  Hugo's  swelling  rheto- 
ric, splendid  and  stately  with  soaring  figures  of  speech. 


TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS        147 

In  his  "  New  Art  of  Making  Plays,"  Lope  de  Vega 
discussed  the  various  stanzas  and  suggested  that  the 
sonnet  was  suitable  for  a  soliloquy,  —  a  suggestion 
which  raises  a  very  pretty  question  as  to  whether  the 
artificiality  of  the  soliloquy  itself  might  not  be  dis- 
guised by  the  artificiality  of  the  form  in  which  it  was 
presented.  An  arbitrary  interweaving  of  rimes  recall- 
ing the  structure  of  the  true  sonnet  is  to  be  found  more 
than  once  in  the  earlier  plays  of  Shakspere,  wherein 
we  may  readily  detect  the  delight  of  the  young  poet  in 
mere  verbal  ingenuity.  But  Shakspere  was  a  practical 
playwright,  up  to  every  kind  of  trick  of  his  trade,  and 
making  his  profit  out  of  every  convention  acceptable 
to  his  audiences.  The  soliloquy  was  far  too  convenient 
a  device  to  be  given  up;  and  probably  the  thought 
never  entered  Shakspere's  head  that  he  could  get  along 
without  it. 

In  scarcely  any  of  his  strongest  plays,  has  he  taken 
more  trouble  with  his  plot,  with  its  structure,  with  its 
conduct,  than  he  has  in  "Othello";  and  in  scarcely 
any  other  is  the  soliloquy  more  frequently  employed. 
He  uses  it  again  and  again  to  let  lago  reveal  his  own 
villainy,  as  though  he  did  not  want  the  turbulent 
groundlings  to  be  in  any  doubt  as  to  the  wickedness  of 
his  honest  lago.  And  so  it  is  that  at  the  end  of  the  first 
act,  lago  simply  talks  aloud  to  the  audience,  frankly 
taking  them  into  his  confidence  and  exposing  his  own 
dark  designs.  In  the  middle  of  the  second  act,  and 
again  at  the  end  of  that  act,  lago  explains  his  schemes 
to  the  spectators,  as  his  plans  take  shape  in  his  foul 
brain. 

As  lago  is  the  incomparable  villain  of  the  master 
of  the  English  stage,  so  is  Tartuffe  the  incomparable 


148  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

villain  of  the  master  of  the  French  stage ;  and  it  must 
be  confessed  that  Moliere  is  able  to  make  his  hypocrite 
transparent  without  the  aid  of  a  single  soliloquy  or 
a  single  aside.  Disclaiming  these  artless  devices,  he 
so  contrives  his  story  that  we  cannot  help  knowing 
Tartuffe  for  what  he  really  is,  long  before  we  first  hear 
his  voice,  and  here  Moliere  reveals  himself  as  truly 
modern,  whereas  Shakspere,  having  accepted  the  Eliza- 
bethan tradition  as  he  found  it,  is  perforce  semi-me- 
dieval in  his  methods. 

But  often  Moliere  is  no  more  logical  in  his  use  of 
the  soliloquy  than  Shakspere  is.  Neither  the  French 
dramatist  nor  the  English  made  any  distinction  be- 
tween that  soliloquy  which  reveals  the  character  and 
that  which  informs  us  as  to  the  facts  of  the  plot.  Both 
held  that  the  soliloquy  was  equally  pleasing,  no  matter 
whether  it  was  merely  supplying  information  which 
a  more  scrupulous  playwright  would  have  conveyed 
to  the  audience  by  some  less  arbitrary  contrivance,  or 
whether  it  displayed  before  us  the  conflicting  emotions 
of  a  hero  at  the  crisis  of  his  fate,  not  possible  to  be 
made  known  except  out  of  his  own  mouth.  Yet  the 
distinction  between  these  two  purposes  for  which  the 
soliloquy  may  be  used,  ought  to  be  obvious  enough, 
even  if  it  was  not  seized  by  Moliere  and  Shakspere. 


Nowadays,  playwrights  are  forced  to  find  a  better 
way  for  a  character  to  "explain  his  designs"  than  to 
leave  him  alone  on  the  stage,  so  that  he  can  tell  the 
spectators  what  he  is  going  to  do.  Such  a  proceeding 
seems  a  little  too  easy  to  be  quite  worth  while ;  and  the 
soliloquy  which  merely  transmits  information  to  the 


TRADITIONS  AND  CONVENTIONS        149 

audience  can  be  defended  only  with  difficulty.  But 
the  soliloquy  in  which  a  character  speaks  "boldly  of 
his  most  secret  thoughts"  stands  on  a  higher  plane. 
It  lets  a  tortured  hero  unpack  his  heart;  it  opens  a 
window  into  his  soul ;  and  it  gives  the  spectator  a  plea- 
sure not  to  be  had  otherwise.  It  allows  us  to  listen  to 
the  communing  of  a  character  with  himself,  as  though 
we  were  not  overhearing  what  he  is  saying.  Professor 
Bradley  has  remarked,  in  his  stimulating  discussion  of 
"Shaksperean  Tragedy,"  that  "in  listening  to  a  so- 
liloquy we  ought  never  to  feel  that  we  are  being  ad- 
dressed." He  declared  that  in  this  respect,  as  in  others, 
many  of  Shakspere's  soliloquies  are  masterpieces;  but 
he  admitted  that  "in  some  the  purpose  of  giving  in- 
formation lies  bare,  and  in  one  or  two  the  actor  openly 
speaks  to  the  audience."  And  Moliere  is  as  vulnerable 
to  this  reproof  as  Shakspere. 

The  fact  is  that  when  Shakspere  and  Moliere  came 
to  the  theater,  they  found  the  soliloquy  a  labor-saving 
contrivance  that  they  took  over  without  bestowing  a 
thought  on  the  principle  underlying  it.  This  principle, 
if  formally  declared,  would  be  that  the  soliloquy  is  a 
means  of  exposing  to  the  spectators  the  actual  thoughts 
of  a  character  when  he  is  alone.  In  other  words,  an 
actor  soliloquizing  must  be  supposed  to  be  thinking 
aloud.  But  so  little  did  either  Shakspere  or  Moliere 
care  for  the  principle  involved,  that  both  of  them 
unhesitatingly  set  before  us  a  character  soliloquizing 
and  yet  overheard  by  some  other  character.  This  is 
a  contradiction  in  terms,  if  we  analyze  it  philosophi- 
cally, —  but  that  is  exactly  what  was  not  attempted  by 
either  of  these  great  dramatists  or  by  any  of  the  play- 
goers of  their  times.  What  to  us  may  seem  an  arrant 


150  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

absurdity  is  to  be  found  as  early  as  Terence  and  as 
late  as  Beaumarchais.  Shakspere  lets  Romeo  overhear 
Juliet's  soliloquizing  on  the  balcony;  and  Moliere  is 
as  careless  in  the  "Miser." 

There  was  a  clever  man  once  who  justified  his  habit 
of  talking  to  himself  by  two  good  reasons,  —  he  liked  to 
talk  to  a  man  of  sense  and  he  liked  to  hear  a  man  of 
sense  talk.  It  is  in  the  "  Miserables  "  that  Victor  Hugo 
tried  to  justify  the  monologue  by  one  bad  reason;  he 
declared  that  it  was  an  error  to  believe  that  the  solilo- 
quy was  not  natural,  since  "often  a  strong  agitation 
speaks  out  loud."  But  a  strong  agitation  does  not 
speak  out  loud  a  speech  of  a  hundred  lines  and  more, 
as  the  King  does  in  "Hernani."  There  is  no  advan- 
tage in  maintaining  that  the  soliloquy  is  "natural." 
It  is  not;  and  no  more  is  blank  verse  or  highly  con- 
densed prose.  As  Professor  Bradley  has  remarked: 
"Neither  soliloquy  nor  the  use  of  verse  can  be  con- 
demned on  the  mere  ground  that  it  is  unnatural.  No 
dramatic  language  is  natural." 

It  may  seem  strange  that  audiences  which  still  ad- 
mit without  protest  many  another  convention  quite 
as  contrary  to  the  actual  fact,  should  have  awakened 
suddenly  to  the  lack  of  verisimilitude  in  the  soliloquy. 
They  accept  it  without  cavil  in  "Rip  Van  Winkle," 
in  one  act  of  which  no  voice  is  heard  but  Rip's 
talking  to  himself  or  speaking  to  the  dumb  specters. 
They  accept  it  again  in  a  protean  piece  like  the  one« 
act  "Dick  Turpin,"  in  which  all  the  parts  are  as- 
sumed by  the  same  actor,  and  which  is  necessarily 
nothing  but  a  succession  of  monologues.  But  they 
are  annoyed  when  the  characters  in  a  modern  play  of 
real  life  take  the  liberty  of  soliloquizing,  because  both 


TRADITIONS  AND   CONVENTIONS         151 

authors  and  audiences  have  discovered  that  it  is  out 
of  place  on  the  picture-frame  stage  of  to-day,  how- 
ever appropriate  it  may  have  been  to  the  platform- 
stage  of  yesterday.  The  dramatist  can  utilize  it  now 
only  at  his  peril ;  at  best  he  can  use  it  on  rare  occa- 
sions and  very  briefly,  merely  to  give  a  fleeting  glimpse 
of  the  speaker's  deeper  emotion.  If  it  is  boldly  em- 
ployed in  the  fashion  formerly  acceptable,  it  will  revolt 
us  by  what  we  now  see  to  be  its  flagrant  incompati- 
bility with  the  conditions  of  the  modern  theater.  It 
will  probably  survive  as  a  tradition  in  the  poetic  drama, 
where  we  are  glad  always  to  listen  to  noble  thoughts 
loftily  phrased.  It  may  even  linger  also  in  the  lighter 
forms  of  comedy,  where  we  shall  not  sharply  feel  its 
incongruity,  because  we  do  not  take  these  humorous 
pieces  seriously. 


CHAPTER  VIII 

DRAMATIC   CHARACTERIZATION 

Hamlet  is  a  name;  his  speeches  and  sayings  but  the  idle  coinage 
of  the  poet's  brain.  What,  then,  are  they  not  real  ?  They  are  as  real 
as  our  own  thoughts.  Their  reality  is  in  the  reader's  mind.  It  is  we 
who  are  Hamlet.  This  play  has  a  prophetic  truth,  which  is  above 
that  of  history.  Whoever  has  become  thoughtful  and  melancholy 
through  his  own  mishaps  or  those  of  others ;  whoever  has  borne  about 
with  him  the  clouded  brow  of  reflection,  and  thought  himself  "  too 
much  i'  th'  sun" ;  whoever  has  seen  the  golden  lamp  of  day  dimmed 
by  envious  mists  rising  in  his  own  breast,  and  could  find  in  the  world 
before  him  only  a  dull  blank  with  nothing  left  remarkable  in  it; 
whoever  has  known  "  the  pangs  of  despised  love,  the  insolence  of 
office,  or  the  spurns  which  patient  merit  of  the  unworthy  takes";  he 
who  has  felt  his  mind  sink  within  him,  and  sadness  cling  to  his  heart 
like  a  malady,  who  has  had  his  hopes  blighted  and  his  youth  stag- 
gered by  the  apparitions  of  strange  things;  who  cannot  be  well  at 
ease,  while  he  sees  evil  hovering  near  him  like  a  specter;  whose 
powers  of  action  have  been  eaten  up  by  thought,  he  to  whom  the 
universe  seems  infinite,  and  himself  nothing;  whose  bitterness  of 
soul  makes  him  careless  of  consequences,  and  who  goes  to  a  play  as 
his  best  resource  to  shove  off,  to  a  second  remove,  the  evils  of  life  by 
a  mock  representation  of  them  —  this  is  the  true  Hamlet.  —  WIL- 
LIAM HAZLITT,  The  Characters  of  Shakspere's  Plays. 


FOR  immediate  success  on  the  stage,  a  play  must  have 
a  story  strong  enough  to  arouse  and  retain  the  interest 
of  the  spectators ;  and  it  is  characteristic  of  Aristotle's 
shrewdness  that  he  seized  this  fact  firmly,  and  de- 
clared it  sharply  more  than  two  thousand  years  ago, 
with  only  his  experience  in  the  Attic  theater  to  guide 
him.  But  while  a  sufficient  story  is  a  prerequisite  to 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION          153 

immediate  success,  it  will  bestow  only  a  fleeting  popu- 
larity, if  the  play  is  not  peopled  by  characters  that  lin- 
ger in  the  memory  independently  of  the  action  in  which 
they  have  been  presented.  Taste  in  stories  varies  from 
century  to  century  and  from  country  to  country,  and  the 
number  of  possible  situations  is  so  strictly  limited  that 
the  most  the  new  dramatist  can  do  is  to  shuffle  the  old 
plots  and  to  carry  them  on  with  new  characters.  But 
human  nature  is  much  the  same  the  wide  world  over, 
and  generation  after  generation.  A  character  which 
has  once  impressed  itself  upon  the  contemporaries  of 
the  author  as  vital  and  significant  has  a  chance  of  long 
life ;  and  in  the  final  analysis,  it  is  by  his  power  of  pro- 
jecting characters  that  the  dramatist  survives. 

On  the  plot,  on  the  situations,  on  the  sequence  of 
events,  which  the  playwright  needs  first  of  all  to  win 
the  favor  of  the  throng,  he  must  expend  his  invention, 
and  he  must  be  as  ingenious  as  may  be  in  adroit  de- 
vices to  sustain  the  interest  of  his  story.  On  the  char- 
acters who  live  and  move  inside  this  plot,  he  must 
bestow  the  best  of  his  imagination;  and  into  them, 
he  must  breathe  the  breath  of  life,  so  that  they  will 
exist  for  us  long  after  we  have  lost  our  liking  for  the 
kind  of  story  in  which  they  originally  figured.  To  us 
nowadays,  the  central  incidents  of  the  "  Merchant  of 
Venice"  are  unconvincing,  not  to  call  them  puerile;  but 
Shylock  is  an  unforgettable  figure,  as  alive  to-day  as 
when  he  first  strode  on  the  stage  of  the  Globe  Theater. 
The  plot  of  the  "Winter's  Tale"  is  a  tissue  of  absurdi- 
ties ;  but  the  young  loves  of  Perdita  and  Florizel  still 
enchant  us  because  they  are  eternally  human.  In  the 
"Merchant  of  Venice,"  we  tolerate  the  impossibility 
of  the  situations  for  the  sake  of  the  central  character; 


154  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

and  we  are  almost  as  lenient  toward  the  "Winter's 
Tale,"  although  its  characters  do  not  loom  so  large  in 
our  memories.  A  story  of  some  sort,  there  must  be; 
but  we  reserve  our  warmest  regard  for  the  men  and 
the  women  who  carry  it  on.  It  is  by  veracity  of  char- 
acter delineation,  by  subtlety  of  psychology,  that  the 
great  plays  are  great.  It  is  by  this  power  of  creating 
living  and  breathing  human  beings,  recognizable  fellow- 
creatures  with  ourselves,  that  the  playwright  estab- 
lishes his  title  to  be  considered  truly  a  dramatist.  If 
he  lacks  this  power,  if  he  cannot  leave  behind  him 
characters  that  the  next  generation  will  recognize  and 
relish,  then  his  reputation  is  fleeting;  he  exists  by 
virtue  of  his  plots  only,  and  these  the  playwrights  of 
the  next  generation  will  surely  make  over  in  accord 
with  the  changing  tastes  of  their  own  time. 

Yet  the  dramatist  is  strictly  limited  in  his  means  of 
presenting  his  characters.  He  can  show  them  only  as 
they  appear  to  their  associates.  He  can  put  them  be- 
fore us  only  by  what  they  say  and  by  what  they  do; 
and  he  cannot  explain  or  extenuate  any  word  or  any 
deed.  These  things  must  speak  for  themselves,  since 
the  dramatist  is  forced  to  keep  himself  out  of  his  story, 
and  since  he  is  denied  all  privilege  of  comment.  Here 
is  perhaps  the  most  striking  difference  between  the 
play  and  the  novel.  The  novelist  can  chat  to  his 
readers  about  his  characters ;  he  can  tell  us  not  only 
what  they  say  and  what  they  do,  but  also  what  they 
think;  he  can  go  further,  if  he  so  chooses,  and  let  us 
know  what  he  thinks  of  them  and  what  he  wants  us 
to  think  of  them. 

Much  of  the  charm  of  Thackeray's  novels,  for  in- 
stance, is  due  to  the  incessant  intervention  of  the 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION          155 

author  and  to  the  confidential  commentary  in  which 
the  action  of  the  story  is  constantly  immersed.  We  may 
like  this  method  of  Thackeray's  or  we  may  prefer 
the  sterner  impartiality  of  Balzac;  but  to  no  play- 
wright is  anything  of  the  sort  permitted.  In  the  thea- 
ter, no  comment  is  possible,  no  foot-notes,  no  sign-post 
hands.  On  the  stage,  every  character  must  stand  on 
his  own  feet  and  speak  for  himself ;  he  must  justify  him- 
self out  of  his  own  mouth  and  by  his  own  deeds ;  and 
if  he  is  supposed  to  be  shrewd  and  clever,  he  must 
prove  his  shrewd  cleverness  in  the  sight  of  us  all,  for 
we  will  not  believe  it  unless  we  see  it.  If  he  is  called 
witty,  we  refuse  to  credit  this,  except  on  the  evidence 
of  our  own  ears.  If  we  behold  him  guilty  of  a  contemp- 
tible act,  the  author  can  urge  no  specious  argument 
to  make  us  overlook  it.  The  characters  stand  before 
us  on  the  stage,  and  they  are  what  they  are,  not  what 
the  author  might  like  us  to  believe  them  to  be. 

In  spite  of  this  limitation  of  his  methods  of  repre- 
senting character,  —  perhaps  it  may  be,  more  or  less 
because  of  them,  —  the  dramatist  makes  a  virtue  of 
necessity  and  brings  before  us  human  beings  who  de- 
clare themselves  clearly  by  what  they  say  and  by  what 
they  do.  Hamlet  and  Othello  are  as  real  to  us  as  Don 
Quixote ;  and  Becky  Sharp  is  not  more  alive  than  Lady 
Teazle.  The  genius  of  Moliere  is  great  enough  to  de- 
pict in  a  play  a  hypocrite,  Tartuffe,  who  never  drops  the 
mask  of  assumed  piety,  and  whom  we  know  for  what 
he  is,  even  before  we  have  heard  his  voice.  Indeed,  if 
we  call  the  roll  of  imaginary  characters  who  crowd  our 
memories,  we  are  likely  to  find  that  at  least  half  of 
them  belong  to  the  drama.  The  CEdipus  of  Sophocles 
and  the  Medea  of  Euripides  are  as  distinct  in  our  re- 


156  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

membrance  as  the  Achilles  of  Homer  and  the  Dido  of 
Vergil.  The  task  of  bodying  forth  these  characters 
may  have  been  more  difficult  in  the  dramas  than  it 
was  in  the  epics;  but  beyond  all  question,  it  has  been 
as  satisfactorily  accomplished. 

The  character  reveals  himself  to  the  spectators  by 
what  he  says  and  by  what  he  does.  He  exists  by  his 
actions ;  he  exists  first  of  all,  for  the  sake  of  the  plot  of 
the  play,  and  only  secondly  for  his  own  sake.  And  we 
may  go  further  and  suggest  that  the  dramatist  often 
takes  little  thought  about  those  parts  of  the  career  of 
any  one  of  his  characters,  which  are  not  directly  con- 
nected with  the  special  story  in  which  they  appear,  and 
which  do  not  lie  within  the  play  wherein  that  char- 
acter figures.  The  character  is  what  he  must  be  in 
that  drama ;  but  how  he  came  to  be  that  kind  of  crea- 
ture, the  dramatist  does  not  trouble  to  tell  us ;  he  may 
not  know,  and  he  may  not  care.  What  the  characters 
are  inside  his  play,  the  dramatist  is  intensely  interested 
in ;  but  what  they  may  have  been  or  what  they  will  be 
outside  of  his  play,  he  does  not  ask. 

Especially  is  this  true  of  Moliere.  Who  was  Tar- 
tuffe,  before  his  sinister  shadow  crossed  the  threshold  of 
Orgon's  happy  home?  WThat  misdeeds  had  he  been 
already  guilty  of  and  what  misadventures  had  he  al- 
ready met  ?  Moliere  does  not  tell  us ;  and  very  likely 
he  could  not  have  told  us.  Probably  he  would  have 
explained  that  it  did  not  matter,  since  Tartuffe  is  what 
he  is ;  he  is  what  we  see  him ;  we  have  only  to  look 
at  him  and  to  listen  to  him  to  know  all  we  need  to 
know  about  him.  And  who  was  Celimene,  the  young 
widow  who  drove  the  Misanthrope  to  despair  ?  What 
was  her  family  ?  What  was  her  education  ?  Who  was 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION          157 

her  first  husband  ?  When  did  he  die  ?  These  are  ques- 
tions Moliere  is  not  moved  to  answer.  Celimene  is 
alive,  as  Tartuffe  was  alive ;  that  is  enough  for  their 
creator.  Moliere's  characters  emerge  into  view,  full- 
grown  and  full-blooded;  they  play  their  parts  in  the 
plot ;  and  then  the  curtain  falls  and  that  is  the  last  we 
see  of  them. 

Here,  as  in  so  many  other  aspects,  Shakspere  is  at 
one  with  Moliere.  We  find  the  melancholy  Jaques  in 
the  Forest  of  Arden,  moralizing  at  large  and  bandy- 
ing repartees  with  a  chance  clown ;  he  talks  and  we 
know  him  at  once,  as  we  know  a  man  we  have  met 
many  times.  But  who  is  he  ?  What  is  his  rank  ?  Where 
does  he  come  from  ?  What  brought  him  so  far  afield 
and  so  deep  into  the  greenwood  ?  Shakspere  leaves  us 
in  the  dark  as  to  all  these  things ;  and  perhaps  he  was 
in  the  dark  himself.  Jaques  is  needed  where  we  find 
him,  in  the  play  with  the  Banished  Duke  and  his  men; 
and  there  Shakspere  put  him,  conceived  all  of  a  piece 
and  all  of  a  sudden,  for  this  special  purpose.  And 
lago,  who  is  he?  How  came  such  an  incomparable 
villain  to  be  intimate  with  Othello  ?  How  was  it  that 
he  had  many  friends  among  the  foremost  men  of 
Venice?  Where  had  he  met  and  married  Emilia? 
How  was  it  that  his  wife  was  the  attendant  of  Des- 
demona  ?  These  things  Shakspere  does  not  delay  to 
explain;  he  takes  them  for  granted;  they  are  because 
they  are;  and  lago,  being  what  he  is  in  the  play,  it 
matters  little  what  he  was  before  the  play  began. 

Before  writing  a  novel,  Turgenieff  used  to  set  down 
the  exact  and  detailed  biography  of  every  character 
who  was  to  appear  in  his  story,  thus  deciding  in  advance 
their  antecedents,  their  birth,  their  education,  and  their 


158  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

relations  to  each  other  previous  to  the  beginning  of 
the  tale  in  which  they  were  all  to  take  part.  No  doubt, 
other  novelists  have  found  it  profitable  to  make  use  of 
similar  devices ;  but  to  a  dramatist,  such  particulariza- 
tion  would  seem  needless.  His  characters  appear  to 
him  moving  and  talking ;  he  puts  them  into  his  play 
alive;  and  there  they  are  once  for  all.  He  asks  them 
no  questions  as  to  the  existence  they  must  have  led 
before  they  came  on  the  stage  to  play  their  parts  in 
his  piece. 

Mrs.  Jameson  wrote  a  charming  and  fanciful  book 
on  the  "  Girlhood  of  Shakspere's  Heroines,"  in  which 
she  tried  to  reconstruct  the  home-life  in  which  each 
of  these  delightful  creatures  had  flowered  into  woman- 
hood,—  Portia  and  Rosalind,  Beatrice  and  Ophelia. 
She  was  ingenious  in  amplifying  what  seemed  to  her 
the  hints  that  Shakspere  let  fall.  Her  work  is  proof 
that  the  great  poet  was  able  to  evoke  characters  so 
interesting  that  we  want  to  know  more  about  them 
than  he  has  chosen  to  tell  us.  But,  after  all,  pleasant 
as  her  labor  was,  it  was  futile.  Portia  and  Rosalind, 
Beatrice  and  Ophelia  live  in  the  plays  in  which  they 
appear;  they  came  into  being  for  that  purpose  and 
for  that  purpose  only.  And  probably,  if  it  could  come 
to  his  knowledge,  no  single  one  of  all  the  immense 
number  of  books  which  have  been  written  about  his 
plays  would  be  more  likely  to  bring  a  smile  to  Shak- 
spere's face  than  this  affectionate  tribute  of  Mrs. 
Jameson's. 

These  girl-heroines  of  Shakspere,  and  all  the  other 
characters,  male  and  female,  who  inhabit  his  plays,  are 
self-explanatory.  We  accept  them  at  first  sight,  without 
hesitation.  We  recognize  their  humanity  and  their 


DRAMATIC   CHARACTERIZATION          159 

vitality,  although  it  is  only  a  fleeting  glimpse  of  a  frag- 
ment of  their  lives  that  we  are  allowed.  Limited 
though  our  vision  may  be,  the  opportunity  is  ade- 
quate for  Shakspere,  as  it  is  for  Sophocles  and  for  Mo- 
liere,  and  for  all  the  other  masters  of  the  drama,  each 
in-  his  own  fashion.  The  characters  they  set  before  us 
on  the  stage  seem  to  us  full,  rounded,  and  complete. 
We  feel  that  we  are  acquainted  with  the  chief  of  these 
characters  as  we  do  not  feel  ourselves  acquainted  with 
our  intimate  friends.  We  know  all  we  need  to  know 
about  them,  for  we  can  guess  in  advance  what  they 
will  do  in  the  hour  of  trial.  We  anticipate  their  emo- 
tions and  their  acts  at  the  moment  of  stress.  We  do 
not  doubt  that  they  will  be  true  to  themselves. 

We  feel  this  even  when  these  characters  are  super- 
natural, when  they  are  outside  any  possible  experience 
that  we  could  have  had  in  this  mortal  life.  Shakspere, 
for  example,  delights  in  ghosts  and  in  witches  and  in 
fairies ;  and  once,  at  least,  in  Caliban,  he  invites  us  to 
behold  a  strange,  uncanny,  abnormal  being  only  half- 
human.  And  yet  we  never  question  the  propriety  of 
these  weird  creatures,  each  of  whom  obeys  the  law 
of  its  own  being.  They  may  be  beyond  nature,  as  we 
apprehend  it,  but  they  never  strike  us  as  unnatural. 
Where  Shakspere  seems  most  to  recede  from  humanity, 
so  Charles  Lamb  declared,  "he  will  be  found  the  near- 
est to  it.  From  beyond  the  scope  of  nature  if  he  sum- 
mons possible  existences,  he  subjugates  them  to  the  law 
of  her  consistency.  He  is  beautifully  loyal  to  that  kind 
of  sovereign  directness  even  when  he  seems  most  to 
detest  her.  Caliban,  the  Witches,  are  as  true  to  the 
laws  of  their  own  nature  (ours  with  a  difference)  as 
Othello,  Hamlet,  Macbeth." 


160  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

ii 

Vital  as  the  chief  characters  are  in  the  major  plays 
of  the  leading  dramatists,  existing  independently  of  the 
plot,  as  they  seem  to  do  -when  we  think  about  them, 
every  one  of  them  is  not  only  a  character  but  also  a 
part  composed  for  execution  by  an  actor,  —  often  by 
some  one  particular  actor  to  whose  capacity  it  was 
skilfully  adjusted,  —  Burbage  or  Coquelin,  Mile,  de 
Champmesle  or  Mile,  de  Moliere.  In  the  plays  of  the 
inferior  playwrights,  there  are  parts  only,  and  these 
parts  depend  for  their  individuality  upon  the  his- 
trionic power  of  the  performers.  In  the  plays  of  the 
superior  dramatists,  these  parts,  adjusted  conscien- 
tiously to  the  actors,  are  also  characters  whose  abiding 
life  is  detached  from  the  performer  and  even  from  the 
play  itself.  As  parts,  they  may  have  been  enlarged  or 
limited  to  fit  themselves  to  the  comedian  or  the  trage- 
dian to  whom  they  were  first  intrusted  when  the  piece 
was  originally  acted;  but  as  characters,  they  so  im- 
press themselves  upon  us  that  we  do  not  necessarily 
think  of  the  stage  when  we  consider  them. 

What  special  aspects  and  attributes  of  any  character 
the  author  shall  set  before  us,  must  always  be  decided 
by  the  situations  of  the  piece  in  which  that  character 
is  to  figure.  This  is  made  plain  when  we  find  a  drama- 
tist presenting  the  same  character  to  us  in  successive 
plays,  for  we  cannot  help  discovering  that  the  charac- 
ter is  never  quite  identical  in  both  pieces.  Sophocles 
represents  Creon  in  "CEdipus"  and  in  "Antigone"; 
and  the  character  is  distinctly  different  in  the  later 
play,  with  a  difference  not  to  be  accounted  for  by  the 
lapse  of  time  and  by  the  strain  of  the  passing  years. 
The  later  Creon  varies  from  the  earlier  Creon,  because 


DRAMATIC   CHARACTERIZATION          161 

the  plots  of  the  two  plays  are  unlike,  and  because  he 
cannot  be  exactly  the  same  person  in  all  his  charac- 
teristics in  the  one  piece  that  he  was  in  the  other. 
When  Shakspere  showed  the  fat  knight  in  love,  it  was 
a  sadly  shorn  Falstaff  which  the  plot  of  the  "  Merry 
Wives"  forced  him  to  bring  before  us.  The  action  of 
that  farce,  the  arbitrary  sequence  of  its  comic  situa- 
tions, compelled  the  dramatist  to  let  us  see  a  Falstaff 
who  is  only  a  shrunken  copy  of  the  superb  figure  that 
swaggered  through  the  earlier  chronicle-play.  And 
Moliere  acted  Sganarelle  in  half  a  dozen  different 
pieces,  in  no  two  of  which  is  he  exactly  the  same  being. 

In  their  broad  outlines,  the  two  Creons,  the  two  Fal- 
staffs  and  the  half-dozen  Sganarelles  are  alike,  but 
they  differ  in  many  minor  traits,  sometimes  even  con- 
tradicting the  characteristics  they  had  when  they  first 
appeared  before  the  public.  And  it  would  not  be  dif- 
ficult to  show  that  these  divergencies  are  the  direct 
result  of  the  plots  of  the  later  plays.  Even  if  the 
dramatist  had  wanted  to  make  these  creatures  of  his 
imagination  retain  all  their  original  characteristics,  he 
could  not  very  well  have  done  so,  since  the  original 
plot  and  the  original  character  are  intertwined  and  in- 
terwoven so  inextricably  that,  when  the  characters  are 
disentangled  from  this  first  plot  to  be  immeshed  in  an- 
other series  of  complications,  they  have  to  adjust  them- 
selves to  these  new  conditions.  They  cannot  help  being 
subdued  to  what  they  work  in.  On  the  stage,  the  au- 
thor can  show  us  the  character  only  as  it  is  involved 
in  the  action ;  and  the  action  itself  decides  just  how 
much  of  the  character  can  be  shown,  and  what  aspects 
of  it  are  to  be  emphasized. 

In  every  really  important  play,  the  characters  make 


162  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  plot,  and  the  story  is  what  it  is  merely  because  the 
characters  are  what  they  are.  Yet  after  all,  the  char- 
acters are  only  and  can  be  only  what  the  plot  permits 
them  to  be.  The  conjunction  of  character  and  action 
is  no  chance  mechanical  mixture;  it  is  rather  an  inti- 
mate chemical  union.  Character  and  plot  are  not  set 
side  by  side ;  they  are  united ;  each  exists  for  the  sake 
of  the  other  and  in  combination  with  the  other.  This 
is  perhaps  the  reason  —  or  at  least  one  of  the  reasons 
—  why  the  dramatist  knows  and  cares  little  about  his 
characters  except  as  they  reveal  themselves  in  the  situ- 
ations of  his  play.  He  cares  intensely  about  what  they 
are  and  what  they  do  and  what  they  say,  while  they 
are  on  the  stage  in  his  play.  What  they  may  be,  or 
what  they  may  have  done  or  said  at  other  times,  he 
cares  little.  They  have  their  significance  for  him  only 
within  the  framework  of  his  drama. 

It  is  but  a  small  portion  of  the  life  of  any  character 
that  the  dramatist  can  show ;  and  if  we  seek  to  deduce 
the  whole  man  from  the  part  the  author  has  chosen 
to  present  in  action  before  us,  we  need  a  minute  know- 
ledge of  human  nature  and  a  constructive  imagination, 
like  Cuvier's  when  he  demonstrated  his  ability  to  re- 
constitute an  unknown  animal  from  a  few  fragmentary 
bones.  And  when  we  are  tempted  to  this  adventure, 
we  shall  do  well  to  remember  that  Cuvier  was  bring- 
ing to  life  again  a  being  before  unknown,  whereas  the 
great  characters  of  the  great  plays  are  already  as  well 
known  to  us  as  they  are  ever  likely  to  be.  We  may 
amuse  ourselves  by  following  in  the  footsteps  of  Mrs. 
Jameson,  but  the  exercise  must  be  its  own  reward ;  and 
we  do  well  to  be  on  our  guard  against  overestimating 
its  importance. 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION          163 

in 

Stevenson  once  told  a  friend  that  he  knew  only  three 
ways  of  making  a  story.  One  might  start  with  a  group 
of  characters  and  devise  a  plot  to  exhibit  them ;  or  one 
might  begin  with  a  plot  and  fit  characters  to  this;  or 
one  might  subordinate  both  plot  and  characters  to  a 
special  atmosphere,  which  was  to  be  realized  and  made 
impressive.  In  the  theater,  this  third  method  is  im- 
possible, since  atmosphere  alone  is  insufficient  to  hold 
the  attention  of  the  throng.  The  other  two  methods 
are  available  for  the  playwright ;  and  there  is  no  diffi- 
culty in  adducing  examples  of  plays  composed  in  ac- 
cord with  the  one  or  the  other  of  these  methods.  The 
"Bourgeois  Gentilhomme,"  for  example,  is  plainly  a 
piece  in  the  conception  of  which  the  author  began  with 
the  character  of  M.  Jourdain ;  having  this  central  figure 
clearly  in  mind,  Moliere  devised  situations  specially 
to  set  off  the  several  facets  of  M.  Jourdain's  person- 
ality. Indeed,  so  intense  was  Moliere's  interest  in  this 
character,  which  he  was  elaborating  for  his  own  acting, 
that  he  was  a  little  careless  in  the  putting  together  of 
the  plot  wherein  the  ambitious  burgher  is  presented; 
and  as  a  result,  the  actual  story  of  the  play  does  not 
get  under  way  until  the  third  act,  the  two  earlier  acts 
having  been  taken  up  with  the  exhibiting  of  the  foibles 
and  personal  peculiarities  of  M.  Jourdain.  In  the 
"Bourgeois  Gentilhomme,"  we  cannot  help  feeling 
that  Moliere  did  not  take  trouble  enough  to  find  a 
plot  proper  for  the  full  display  of  his  central  character; 
at  least,  we  are  compelled  to  confess  that  in  this  piece 
he  has  sacrificed  plot  to  character. 

In  the  great  Greek  tragedies,  we  discover  the  results 
of  the  other  method,  that  of  taking  a  story  ready-made 


164  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

and  of  fitting  characters  to  it.  In  fact,  this  method  was 
more  or  less  imposed  on  the  writers  of  Attic  tragedy 
by  the  recognized  demand  upon  them  to  select  their 
themes  from  one  or  another  of  the  many  legends  which 
were  held  to  be  the  best  material  for  the  purposes  of 
the  theatrical  poet.  Thus  the  Athenian  dramatist, 
whatever  story  he  might  choose  to  handle,  found  his 
freedom  circumscribed  by  the  public  expectation  that 
he  should  not  depart  too  widely  from  the  sequence  of 
events  consecrated  by  tradition.  The  details  of  in- 
cident he  might  vary  at  will ;  but  the  main  lines  of  his 
story  were  laid  down  for  him  before  he  began.  As 
soon  as  he  had  announced  his  subject,  the  spectators 
knew  in  advance  the  successive  episodes  which  he  was 
at  liberty  to  represent.  He  might  suppress  some  of 
these  episodes,  and  he  might  make  others  more  sig- 
nificant than  any  of  his  predecessors  had  done;  but 
he  was  not  at  liberty  to  contradict  the  legend  as  it  had 
been  transmitted  from  earlier  generations. 

As  a  result  of  this  limitation  of  the  themes  of  tragedy 
to  a  prescribed  body  of  traditional  tales,  the  drama- 
tists were  compelled  to  treat  the  same  subjects  again 
and  again.  Every  poet  was  familiar  with  the  plays 
which  various  of  his  predecessors  had  written  on  any 
subject  he  might  undertake,  and  he  was  well  aware 
that  his  successors  would  make  use  of  the  same  sub- 
ject, each  in  turn  modifying  it  to  suit  his  mood.  The 
treatment  of  the  theme  was  therefore  all-important, 
since  the  playwright-poet  could  not  profit  by  absolute 
novelty  of  story.  Probably  the  Attic  dramatists  felt 
always  that  they  were  working  in  a  severe  competition 
with  their  predecessors  and  with  their  successors; 
and  very  likely  this  put  them  on  their  mettle  and  kept 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION          165 

them  up  to  the  mark.  They  had  to  take  a  twice-told 
tale  and  interpret  it  anew ;  they  had  to  revive  the  faded 
figures  of  the  legend  and  to  give  fresh  meaning  to  the 
old  story;  and  this  is  what  the  greatest  of  them  did 
with  unfailing  felicity.  JSschylus  and  Sophocles  wrote 
tragedies  on  these  traditional  themes  and  under  these 
restrictions,  in  which  there  is  no  suggestion  of  con- 
straint. The  "  Agamemnon  "  and  the  "  (Edipus  "  seem 
to  us  to  have  been  wrought  with  the  utmost  freedom ; 
and  their  plots  appear  to  be  only  the  logical  result  of 
the  interrelation  of  the  several  characters. 

The  same  praise  may  be  bestowed  also  upon  Shak- 
spere.  If  there  ever  was  a  play  in  which  character  seems 
to  condition  plot,  in  which  the  action  is  what  it  is  only 
because  the  central  figure  is  what  he  is,  that  play  is 
"Hamlet."  In  this  tragedy,  all  the  successive  situa- 
tions are  the  result  of  the  special  characteristics  of  the 
hero.  If  we  did  not  know  better,  we  might  well  be- 
lieve that  Shakspere  had  first  conceived  Hamlet,  and 
then  cast  about  him  for  a  story  in  which  that  charac- 
ter might  be  revealed.  But  we  do  know  better;  we 
are  aware  that  this  was  not  the  case  and  that  the  plot 
of  "Hamlet"  had  been  constructed  by  an  earlier  play- 
wright, possibly  Kyd,  who  had  seen  fit  to  make  a  mere 
melodrama  of  it,  a  violent  tragedy-of -blood,  full  of 
broad  theatrical  ism,  certain  to  please  the  strong-nerved 
playgoing  public  of  those  tumultuous  days.  This 
tragedy-of-blood  Shakspere  took  for  his  own,  and  made 
it  his  own,  partly  by  purging  away  some  of  its  grosser 
effects  and  partly  by  elevating  the  character  of  Hamlet 
to  his  own  loftiest  level.  Apparently,  he  did  not  ac- 
complish this  all  at  once ;  finding  the  theme  congenial, 
lie  returned  to  it  again  and  again,  as  though  it  were 


166  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

a  labor  of  love.  He  gave  "Hamlet"  revision  after  re- 
vision until  he  had  put  himself  into  it  amply,  and  until 
he  had  so  ennobled  it  that  it  was  the  richest  expres- 
sion of  his  genius.  What  he  found  a  coarse  melodrama, 
he  left  the  most  intellectual  of  tragedies,  —  the  play 
in  which  he  seemed  most  abundantly  to  have  voiced 
himself.  He  took  over  another  man's  invention  and 
transfigured  it  by  his  own  superb  imagination. 

What  JSschylus  and  Sophocles  had  done  with 
"Agamemnon"  and  "CEdipus,"  and  what  Shakspere 
did  with  "Hamlet,"  Moliere  did  with  "Don  Juan." 
The  skeleton  of  his  great  play  did  not  differ  very  much 
from  that  of  the  Spanish  piece  from  which  he  derived 
it  more  or  less  indirectly;  but  its  meaning,  its  vitality, 
its  final  value,  these  qualities  it  owed  to  Moliere,  as 
indisputably  as  "Hamlet"  was  indebted  to  Shakspere 
for  its  enduring  power.  And  this  is  evidence  that  it 
matters  little  where  the  dramatist  actually  begins, 
whether  with  plot  or  with  character.  What  does  mat- 
ter is  where  he  ends,  whether  the  resultant  play  pre- 
sents a  story  wherein  the  characters  are  merely  the 
creatures  of  the  plot,  or  a  story  wherein  the  plot  seems 
to  be  subordinate  to  character.  It  is  by  the  final  result 
that  the  dramatist  must  be  judged,  and  not  by  his 
original  choice  of  a  method  of  procedure. 

The  leading  characters  in  the  great  plays  are  all 
good  parts,  forever  tempting  to  the  ambitious  actor. 
Although  they  may  have  been  devised  originally  for 
some  one  performer  contemporary  with  the  author, 
they  transcend  the  limitation  of  this  actor's  personal- 
ity. They  are  not  mere  profiles;  they  are  rounded 
figures  to  be  approached  from  all  the  points  of  the 
compass;  and  therefore  they  are  open  to  a  wide  va- 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION          167 

riety  of  interpretation  by  later  actors.  In  fact,  the  au- 
thor would  often  be  surprised  to  discover  that  a  char- 
acter which  he  imagined  for  a  performer  of  a  special 
type,  might  be  taken  successfully  by  a  performer  of  an 
entirely  different  temperament. 

Perhaps  the  most  obvious  illustration  of  this  is  to 
be  found  in  the  stage-history  of  the  "  School  for  Scan- 
dal." Sheridan  fitted  the  parts  in  this  comedy  to  the 
company  he  had  inherited  from  Garrick,  and  no  one 
of  them  was  more  closely  adjusted  to  the  special  per- 
former than  the  character  of  Lady  Teazle,  which  was 
intended  for  Mrs.  Abington.  Lady  Teazle  is  a  country- 
girl  who  has  become  a  woman  of  fashion ;  and  Mrs. 
Abington  was  the  incomparable  representative  of  the 
fine  ladies  of  high-comedy.  But  when  Mrs.  Abington 
retired,  Lady  Teazle  was  undertaken  by  Mrs.  Jordan, 
whose  reputation  had  been  made  by  the  performance 
of  romps  and  hoydens.  Mrs.  Abington  had  seen  in 
Lady  Teazle  only  the  woman  of  fashion ;  and  Mrs. 
Jordan  saw  in  Lady  Teazle  rather  the  country-girl 
who  was  aping  the  airs  and  graces  of  a  fine  lady.  This 
second  interpretation  of  the  character  was  probably 
not  at  all  what  Sheridan  had  intended;  but  he  had 
builded  better  than  he  knew  and  the  character  was 
richer  in  variety  than  he  had  supposed.  In  its  way, 
Mrs.  Jordan's  performance  of  the  part  was  quite  as 
effective  as  Mrs.  Abington's  had  been.  The  character 
which  can  be  seen  from  only  one  angle  is  as  thin  as  a 
silhouette.  It  lacks  the  rotundity  of  reality. 

What  is  true  of  characters  in  comedy,  is  true  also  of 
characters  in  tragedy.  lago,  for  example,  was  played 
by  Edwin  Booth  as  the  steely  incarnation  of  evil,  pur- 
suing his  malignant  purpose  with  indomitable  will. 


168  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

But  other  actors  have  chosen  to  present  rather  the 
bluff,  hearty,  soldierly  side  of  "honest  lago,"  and  thus 
to  give  greater  plausibility  to  Othello's  confidence  in 
him.  And  Lewes,  who  saw  them  both,  dwelt  on  the 
extraordinary  differences  which  existed  between  the 
Othello  of  Salvini  and  the  Othello  of  Edmund  Kean. 
The  English  actor  was  impetuous,  fiery,  volcanic, 
where  the  Italian  was  stately,  massive,  and  overwhelm- 
ing. As  wide  a  gulf  yawned  between  the  Hamlet  of 
Fechter  on  the  one  hand,  and  the  Hamlet  of  Booth 
and  of  Irving  on  the  other.  What  Fechter  saw  in  the 
play  was  chiefly  the  immensely  effective  series  of  situa- 
tions ;  and  he  treated  it  as  if  it  was  a  melodrama  only. 
Booth  and  Irving  made  the  situations  subordinate  to 
the  poetry  they  felt  in  the  hero;  they  diminished  the 
violence  of  the  plot  as  far  as  possible  and  bathed  the 
performance  in  melancholy  beauty. 

Consider  also  Jaques  in  "As  You  Like  It,"  and  ask 
how  he  ought  to  be  played.  Is  he  a  bitter  cynic  railing 
against  the  world  and  venting  his  venom  on  all  man- 
kind, the  ultimate  type  of  misanthropic  pessimism? 
Or  is  he  a  humorist,  always  exaggerating  his  feelings 
and  often  saying  far  more  than  he  means,  certain  in 
advance  that  his  associates  will  not  take  him  seriously, 
—  certain,  indeed,  that  they  will  be  readier  to  smile  at 
his  utterances  the  more  extravagant  his  speech  may 
be  ?  Either  of  these  interpretations  is  in  accord  with 
the  language  which  Shakspere  has  put  into  the  mouth 
of  Jaques;  and  it  is  by  this  language  only  that  the 
character  reveals  himself.  We  have  no  other  informa- 
tion about  him;  he  must  be  judged  by  what  he  says; 
and  what  he  says  may  be  interpreted  in  these  two 
wholly  inconsistent  ways. 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION         169 

We  can  know  a  character  in  a  play  only  by  what 
he  says  and  by  what  he  does.  Jaques,  as  it  happens, 
does  nothing ;  his  function  in  the  comedy  is  merely  to 
talk.  And  the  remarks  of  the  other  characters  in  "As 
You  Like  It"  throw  no  light  on  his  enigmatic  char- 
acter. Probably  Shakspere  did  not  intend  these  con- 
tradictory interpretations;  probably  he  meant  Jaques 
to  be  clearly  perceived  for  what  he  is.  But  Shakspere 
so  projected  the  character  that  the  other  interpreta- 
tion —  whichever  this  may  be  —  is  quite  as  accept- 
able now  as  that  which  he  did  intend.  In  Jaques, 
as  in  lago  and  Othello,  as  in  Hamlet,  Shakspere  en- 
dowed his  character  with  the  complexity  of  a  living 
human  being,  whose  peculiarities  of  conduct  and  of 
speech  we  may  discuss  as  we  analyze  those  of  one  of 
our  own  intimates.  The  character  is  alive;  and  like 
all  living  things,  it  is  infinitely  various,  taking  on  dif- 
ferent aspects  in  the  eyes  of  different  observers. 

This  variety  and  this  complexity  in  the  representa- 
tion of  character  may  not  be  the  result  of  the  deliberate 
aim  of  the  dramatist ;  but  he  deserves  the  credit  for  it, 
none  the  less,  since  he  did  it,  even  if  he  did  not  mean  to 
do  it  and  even  if  he  did  not  know  that  he  was  doing  it. 
Perhaps  he  may  have  supposed  that  he  was  giving  to 
the  creature  of  his  imagination  only  the  limited  vitality 
demanded  by  the  plot,  and  yet  his  imagination  may 
have  endowed  this  creature  with  a  larger  life  and  with  a 
richer  personality  than  the  story  called  for.  The  more 
vigorous  his  imagination  and  the  deeper  his  insight 
into  human  nature,  the  more  likely  is  he  to  perform  this 
marvel  all  unwittingly.  The  artist  who  always  does 
his  best  often  does  better  than  the  best  he  intended ;  by 
sheer  integrity  of  effort,  he  is  able  to  surpass  himself. 


170  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

IV 

This  guerdon  is  granted  only  to  the  true  dramatist, 
and  it  is  not  bestowed  upon  the  mere  playwright.  The 
inferior  craftsman,  however  adroit  and  ingenious  he 
may  be,  is  not  distinguished  by  fecundating  imagina- 
tion; and  in  his  plays,  the  characters  do  not  disclose 
themselves  as  more  human  than  he  had  intended.  In 
fact,  the  mere  playwright  does  not  create  character; 
the  most  he  can  do  is  to  devise  effective  parts  for  spe- 
cial performers ;  these  parts  derive  their  fleeting  vital- 
ity from  the  actors  who  sustain  them.  In  default  of 
the  creative  imagination,  the  mere  playwright  is  forced 
to  rely  on  his  plot  rather  than  on  his  characters.  The 
mechanism  of  the  action,  which  is  of  only  secondary 
importance  in  the  plays  of  the  true  dramatists,  is  of 
primary  importance  in  the  pieces  of  the  playwrights. 
Kotzebue,  for  example,  and  Scribe,  displayed  a  most 
prolific  inventiveness  in  devising  situations;  but  no 
character  from  any  one  of  their  plays  lingers  in  the 
memory.  After  beholding  one  of  their  pieces,  we  re- 
call what  the  various  personages  did,  but  we  have  no 
definite  impression  as  to  what  these  personages  are. 

Kotzebue's  characters,  and  Scribe's  also,  exist  only 
in  connection  with  the  plots  of  the  plays  in  which  they 
appear;  they  were  called  into  being  for  the  sake  of 
the  plot;  they  are  sufficient  to  carry  on  the  action,  and 
outside  of  that  special  story,  they  have  no  validity. 
This  is  the  reason  why  Kotzebue  and  Scribe  are  no 
longer  read;  and  their  marvelous  dexterity  in  stage- 
craft has  not  kept  alive  any  single  one  out  of  all  their 
scores  of  plays. 

Even  in  the  most  flourishing  periods  of  theatrical 
productivity,  the  true  dramatists  are  only  a  few;  and 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION          171 

the  immense  majority  of  those  who  supply  the  theater 
are  mere  playwrights.  These  playwrights  rely  on 
their  plots  to  please  the  public ;  and  if  the  stories  they 
narrate  in  action  are  interesting  enough  in  themselves, 
the  characters  may  be  the  stock-figures  of  the  theater, 
which  the  public  seems  willing  to  accept  generation 
after  generation.  There  is  the  young  hero,  very  young 
and  very  heroic,  blameless  and  self-sacrificing.  There 
is  the  lovely  heroine,  equally  exalted  in  sentiment  and 
equally  addicted  to  self-sacrifice.  There  is  the  smiling 
villain,  who  sticks  at  nothing  to  accomplish  his  fell 
purpose  and  who  hates  everybody  —  except  the  hero- 
ine. There  is  the  cantankerous  mother-in-law,  exhaling 
her  scorn  upon  the  unfortunate  man  who  was  unlucky 
enough  to  marry  her  daughter.  There  is  the  comic 
servant,  perpetually  blundering  in  his  misunderstand- 
ing of  his  master's  orders.  There  is  the  stern  father, 
implacable  in  his  determination  to  force  his  son  or 
his  daughter  into  the  marriage  he  has  arranged,  re- 
gardless of  love's  young  dream. 

These  are  only  a  few  of  the  traditional  figures  likely 
to  reappear  at  any  moment  in  a  popular  play.  Figures 
equivalent  to  these  are  recognizable  in  the  drama  of 
every  period.  Latin  comedy,  for  instance,  took  over 
from  the  Greek  at  least  a  dozen  stock-figures  which 
appear  and  reappear  in  play  after  play  of  Plautus  and 
Terence.  There  was  the  greedy  parasite,  earning 
his  dinner  by  gross  flattery  of  his  patron.  There  was 
the  braggart  coward,  forever  boasting  of  his  exploits 
and  yet  keeping  his  skin  whole,  wherever  his  courage 
was  challenged.  There  was  the  intriguing  slave,  who 
was  prolific  in  ingenious  methods  for  extracting  money 
from  his  old  master's  pocket  for  the  benefit  of  his  young 


172  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

master,  and  who   was   untiring   in   running   errands 
and  in  carrying  love-letters. 

These  stock-figures  of  Greek  and  Latin  comedy  re- 
appear again  in  the  improvised  play  of  the  Italians,  in 
the  comedy-of-masks,  which  is  one  of  the  most  interest- 
ing developments  of  the  drama  in  all  its  long  history. 
It  was  a  development  possible  only  among  the  Ital- 
ians, who  are  facile  actors  and  who  have  the  faculty  of 
improvisation.  A  strolling  troop  consisted  of  perhaps 
a  dozen  performers,  every  one  of  whom  impersonated 
always  the  same  character,  a  stock -figure  of  unchang- 
ing peculiarities.  One  of  them  might  be  the  young 
lover,  Lelio,  the  same  in  name  and  in  nature,  what- 
ever the  imbroglio  in  which  he  was  involved.  An- 
other might  be  Pantaleone,  an  old  merchant,  speaking 
the  Venetian  dialect.  A  third  might  be  the  Doctor,  an 
elderly  pedant,  speaking  the  Bolognese  dialect.  Yet 
another  might  be  Pulcinella,  the  rascally  domestic, 
indefatigable  in  ingenious  roguery,  and  speaking  the 
Neapolitan  dialect.  And  a  fifth  might  be  the  Captain, 
the  self-vaunting  soldier,  always  boasting  about  his 
marvelous  feats  of  valor.  Of  the  women,  one  might 
be  Leonora,  the  young  and  lovely  heroine ;  and  another 
might  be  Isabella,  her  equally  beautiful  rival.  A  third 
might  be  Franceschina,  the  pert  waiting-maid,  as  un- 
scrupulous as  the  intriguing  valet  with  whom  she  was 
likely  to  pair  off.  If  the  company  contained  a  performer 
of  old  women,  this  would  be  a  man,  who  was  bold  in 
suggesting  the  least  attractive  attributes  of  elderly 
females.  Add  three  or  four  other  performers  to  fill  in 
the  less  important  personages,  and  we  have  a  company 
competent  to  perform  any  plot  without  the  aid  of  a 
written  play  and  often  without  even  a  rehearsal. 


STAGE-SETS  OF  THE  ITALIAN  COMEDY-OF-MASKS  IN  THE  SEVENTEENTH 
CENTURY,   AS  USED   BY   MOLIERE   IN   MANY  OF  HIS   PLAYS 


DRAMATIC  CHARACTERIZATION          173 

If  the  manager,  who  was  likely  to  be  also  a  leading 
actor  as  well  as  the  deviser  of  the  plots,  had  happened 
to  read  the  Italian  story  out  of  which  Shakspere  made 
"Romeo  and  Juliet,"  he  might  have  "  cast"  it  to  such 
a  company  as  this,  discarding  the  tragic  termination, 
emphasizing  the  romantic  aspects  and  providing  oppor- 
tunities for  the  clowning  of  the  comedians.  Panta- 
leone  would  have  had  a  quarrel  with  the  Doctor.  Lelio 
would  have  been  the  son  of  Pantaleone,  and  Leonora 
would  be  the  daughter  of  the  Doctor.  The  man  who 
played  the  "old  women"  would  be  the  nurse  of  Leo- 
nora ;  and  the  Captain  would  swagger  as  the  cousin  or 
brother  of  Leonora,  whom  Lelio  would  kill  in  a  duel. 
Franceschina  would  be  the  serving-maid  of  Leonora, 
and  Pulcinella  would  be  the  valet  of  Lelio.  The  man- 
ager-author would  call  the  company  together  and  ex- 
plain to  each  the  relation  he  was  supposed  to  bear 
toward  all  the  others.  Then  he  would  indicate  the 
sequence  of  scenes  in  the  several  acts;  and  this  sce- 
nario, as  it  was  called,  would  be  written  out  and  pinned 
up  behind  the  scenes.  The  play  might  begin  with  a 
violent  altercation  between  Pantaleone  and  the  Doctor ; 
but  this  would  be  no*  difficult  demand  upon  either  per- 
former, since  they  had  often  quarrelled  in  earlier  plays. 
A  little  later  might  come  a  long  love-scene  for  Lelio 
and  Leonora :  and  this  again  would  be  no  novelty,  since 
he  had  been  making  love  to  her  in  almost  every  other 
piece  since  he  joined  the  company.  Lelio  had  in  stock 
a  dozen  perfervid  declarations  of  devotion;  and  Leo- 
nora had  by  experience  a  dozen  different  ways  of  re- 
ceiving his  declaration. 

In  this  fashion,  the  story  of  the  loves  of  Romeo 
and  Juliet  might  be  unrolled  by  means  of  these  stock- 


174  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

figures,  each  of  which  retained  his  own  name  always 
and  his  own  individuality.  And  in  this  same  fashion, 
any  other  story,  tragic  or  comic,  might  be  represented 
by  a  similar  company  of  Italian  comedians,  accustomed 
to  one  another,  and  realizing  the  advantages  of  con- 
scientious "team-play."  The  unchanging  and  highly 
colored  type,  which  any  one  of  these  comedians  im- 
personated and  made  his  own,  has  an  obvious  likeness 
to  the  bishop  or  knight  or  any  other  piece  of  a  set  of 
chessmen,whose  rights  and  privileges  are  strictly  limited 
and  absolutely  invariable,  but  who  can  be  set  in  motion 
in  varied  and  limitless  relations  with  the  other  pieces. 
That  the  Italians  were  able  to  interest  audiences, 
generation  after  generation,  with  primitive  plots  of 
this  kind  in  which  character  was  subordinated  to  story, 
is  added  evidence  that  action  is  of  primary  importance 
in  the  theater.  But  the  pieces  these  Italians  impro- 
vised abundantly  had  only  a  fleeting  vogue.  Nothing 
except  depth  and  sincerity  of  character-drawing  can 
endow  a  play  with  the  enduring  merit  which  will  re- 
sist the  inevitable  changes  of  theatrical  fashion.  The 
"Romeo  and  Juliet  "of  Shakspere  survives  to-day,  as 
vital  as  when  it  was  first  acted,  ^because  its  two  fore- 
most figures  are  eternal  types  of  the  heedless  and  head- 
strong passion  of  ardent  youth. 


CHAPTER  IX 

THE   LOGIC   OF   CONSTRUCTION 

You  are  not  going  to  make  or  ruin  your  imagination  while  here. 
That  is  something  that  will  remain  if  you  have  it  in  you;  that  you 
cannot  acquire  if  you  are  not  blessed  with  it.  But  here  you  may 
learn  to  handle  your  tools.  So  measure,  copy,  plumb.  A  carpenter 
who  constantly  uses  a  foot-rule  can  guess  the  length  of  a  foot  better 
than  one  who  seldom  refers  to  it.  —  AUGUSTUS  SAINT-GAUDENS, 
to  his  pupils,  as  reported  by  Homer  Saint-Gaudens. 


THE  technic  of  the  drama  is  more  difficult  to  grasp  than 
the  technic  of  prose-fiction,  because  the  novelist  needs 
to  consider  his  readers  only,  whereas  the  dramatist  has 
always  to  consider  his  actors,  his  theater,  and  his  au- 
dience. When  we  contrast  the  constructive  faculty  re- 
quired by  the  playmaker  with  that  which  we  tolerate  in 
the  story-teller,  we  are  led  to  the  conclusion  that  the 
novel  may  be  the  product  of  unskilled  labor,  whereas 
the  play  must  be  the  work  of  a  craftsman  who  has 
learned  his  trade  and  acquired  the  mastery  of  his 
tools.  Many  a  modern  novel  in  the  English  language, 
more  than  one  of  Dickens's,  is  a  sprawling  invertebrate. 
The  conduct  of  the  story  is  haphazard ;  and  we  may 
guess  that  the  author  modified  his  earlier  intentions 
more  than  once  in  the  course  of  his  writing.  Scott  be- 
gan "  Woodstock"  without  knowing  how  he  was  going 
to  end  it;  and  he  recorded  in  his  journal  that  when 
he  had  finished  the  first  of  the  three  volumes  in  which 


176  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  story  was  originally  published,  he  was  at  a  loss  to 
find  matter  for  the  second  volume. 

Now,  the  playwright  cannot  take  things  in  this 
easy-going  fashion.  He  needs  a  subject  strong  enough 
to  carry  him  through,  since  charm  of  treatment  and  di- 
versity of  incident  will  avail  him  little,  if  his  theme  is 
not  interesting  in  itself.  He  cannot  rely  on  constructed 
decoration;  he  can  only  decorate  his  construction.  As 
the  shrewd  Voltaire  insisted,  the  success  of  a  play  de- 
pends very  largely  on  the  subject  chosen.  This  subject 
must,  as  Aristotle  tells  us,  have  a  certain  magnitude, 
that  is  to  say,  it  cannot  be  trivial  or  casual ;  and  it  must 
have  a  beginning,  a  middle,  and  an  end.  Moreover, 
it  must  be  conducted  from  the  beginning  through  the 
middle  to  the  end,  as  directly  as  may  be.  The  story 
cannot  straggle  into  by-paths;  it  cannot  meander  into 
backwaters;  it  must  move  forward  steadily  and  irre- 
sistibly, setting  before  the  spectators  the  essential  scenes 
of  the  essential  struggle.  The  elder  Dumas  once  de- 
clared that  the  secret  of  success  on  the  stage  was  to 
make  "  the  first  act  clear,  the  last  act  short,  and  all  the 
acts  interesting."  This  is  no  easy  feat;  and  it  can  be 
achieved  only  by  a  scrupulous  forethought  akin  to 
that  employed  by  the  architect  in  designing  a  building 
for  a  special  purpose  on'  a  special  plot  of  land.  The 
dramatist  must  accept  the  obligations  thus  imposed, 
and  he  must  meet  them  as  best  he  can ;  for  it  is  in  meet- 
ing them  that  he  fails  or  triumphs. 

Many  years  ago,  before  he  had  adventured  himself 
in  playwriting,  Mr.  Henry  James  stated  the  case  with 
his  customary  insight. 

"  Between  a  poor  drama  and  a  fine  one,  there  is,"  he  said, 
"a  wider  interval  than  anywhere  else  in  the  scale  of  success. 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         177 

A  sequence  of  speeches  headed  by  proper  names  —  a  string 
of  dialogues  broken  into  acts  and  scenes  —  does  not  con- 
stitute a  drama ;  not  even  when  the  speeches  are  very  clever 
and  the  dialogue  bristles  with  points.  The  fine  thing  in  a 
real  drama,  generally  speaking,  is  that  more  than  any  other 
work  of  literary  art,  it  needs  a  masterly  structure.  It  needs 
to  be  shaped  and  fashioned  and  laid  together,  and  this  pro- 
cess makes  a  demand  upon  an  artist's  rarest  gifts.  He  must 
combine  and  arrange,  interpolate  and  eliminate,  play  the 
joiner  with  the  most  attentive  skill ;  and  yet  at  the  end  effect- 
ually bury  his  tools  and  his  sawdust,  and  invest  his  elaborate 
skeleton  with  the  smoothest  and  most  polished  integument. 
The  five-act  drama  —  serious  or  humorous,  poetic  or  pro- 
saic —  is  like  a  box  of  fixed  dimensions  and  inelastic  mate- 
rial, into  which  a  mass  of  precious  things  are  to  be  packed 
away.  It  is  a  problem  in  ingenuity,  and  a  problem  of  the 
most  interesting  kind.  The  precious  things  in  question  seem 
out  of  all  proportion  to  the  compass  of  the  receptacle;  but 
the  artist  has  an  assurance  that  with  patience  and  skill  a 
place  may  be  made  for  each,  and  that  nothing  need  be  clipped 
or  crumpled,  squeezed  or  damaged.  The  false  dramatist 
either  knocks  out  the  sides  of  his  box,  or  plays  the  deuce  with 
the  contents;  the  real  one  gets  down  on  his  knees,  disposes 
of  his  goods  tentatively,  this,  that,  and  the  other  way,  loses 
his  temper  but  keeps  his  ideal,  and  at  last  rises  up  in  triumph, 
having  packed  his  coffer  in  the  one  way  that  is  mathematically 
right.  It  closes  perfectly,  and  the  lock  turns  with  a  click ;  be- 
tween one  object  and  another  you  cannot  insert  the  point 
of  a  penknife.  To  work  successfully  beneath  a  few  grave, 
rigid  laws,  is  always  a  strong  man's  highest  ideal  of  success." 

The  dramatist  has  to  choose  a  theme  and  to  develop 
this  theme  into  a  story  suitable  for  the  stage ;  he  has  to 
set  this  story  in  motion  so  that  the  scenes  which  must  be 
shown  will  follow  one  another  easily ;  he  has  to  people 
this  story  with  characters,  interesting  in  themselves  and 
contrasting  with  one  another ;  and  he  has  to  place  these 


178  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

characters  in  appropriate  surroundings,  devising  op- 
portunities for  them  to  come  together  without  unduly 
straining  probabilities.  He  has  to  do  one  thing  at  a  time 
and  all  things  in  their  turn.  He  has  to  remember  always 
that  the  spectators  for  whose  delight  he  is  working 
have  only  one  pair  of  ears  apiece  and  one  pair  of  eyes. 
The  theater  is  not  a  three-ringed  circus ;  and  he  must 
never  forget  Herbert  Spencer's  declaration  of  the  doc- 
trine of  Economy  of  Attention,  quite  as  applicable  in 
the  other  arts  as  it  is  to  rhetoric.  The  dramatist  must 
make  it  easy  for  the  spectators  to  follow  his  story, 
however  complicated  its  plot  may  be.  He  must  avoid 
confusing  them  or  leaving  them  in  doubt  as  to  the 
reason  for  anything  done  on  the  stage.  The  first  act 
must  be  clear,  of  course ;  but  then  all  the  acts  must  be 
clear,  or  they  will  not  be  interesting.  The  dramatist 
has  not  done  his  duty  when  the  spectators  are  puzzled 
even  for  a  moment  and  ask  each  other  what  it  is  all 
about. 

Yet  Dumas  is  right  in  insisting  that  it  is  of  prime 
importance  that  the  first  act  shall  be  clear,  for  if  this 
is  obscure,  the  attention  of  the  audience  is  distracted, 
and  they  will  not  be  able  to  follow  what  comes  after. 
Two  of  the  most  salient  differences  between  a  play 
and  a  novel  are  due  to  two  of  the  actual  facts  of  per- 
formance; first,  that  in  the  theater,  every  minute  is 
counted,  whereby  the  playwright  can  waste  time  only 
at  the  risk  of  boring  and  of  bewildering  the  specta- 
tors; and,  second,  that  the  spectators  must  seize  the 
thread  of  the  story  as  it  is  unrolled  before  them,  being 
denied  the  privilege  of  turning  back  to  the  first  chap- 
ter to  pick  up  any  hints  they  may  have  missed  inad- 
vertently. 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         179 

ii 

Every  work  of  literary  art  must  have  a  beginning,  a 
middle,  and  an  end;  and  here  is  where  art  sharply 
separates  itself  from  life,  which  is  all  middle,  with  an 
end  that  no  man  may  see,  and  with  numberless  begin- 
nings lost  in  the  dark  backward  of  Time.  The  artist 
has  to  decide  just  what  portion  and  just  how  much  he 
will  present  of  this  unending  pattern  which  is  a-weav- 
ing  on  the  loom  of  eternity.  He  must  have  a  beginning 
somewhere  and  he  must  make  an  end  somehow.  The 
epic  poet  of  old,  and  his  later  inheritor,  the  novelist 
of  to-day,  have  to  conform  to  this  as  well  as  the  dra- 
matic poet ;  but  narrative  art  is  far  freer  than  dramatic, 
far  more  flexible,  far  less  restricted  by  the  demands 
of  a  rigid  form. 

The  strict  limitation  of  the  time  allotted  to  him  de- 
bars the  dramatist  from  the  leisurely  method  of  ap- 
proach which  the  novelist  may  adopt  if  he  sees  fit.  In 
a  story,  the  author  can  begin  as  far  back  as  he  likes, 
filling  his  opening  pages  with  a  detailed  record  of  his 
hero's  ancestry,  even  unto  the  third  and  fourth  genera- 
tion, dilating  at  will  upon  details  not  strictly  essential, 
and  digressing  as  much  or  as  little  as  the  spirit  moves 
him.  But  in  a  play,  the  writer  must  select  what  is  sig- 
nificant, and  he  must  so  present  this  that  its  signifi- 
cance is  manifest  at  first  sight.  He  can  neither  digress 
nor  dilate ;  he  must  keep  to  the  straight  line  which 
is  the  shortest  distance  between  two  points.  Many 
things  must  have  happened  before  he  lifts  the  curtain ; 
and  out  of  all  these,  he  has  to  make  his  choice,  so  that 
he  can  center  attention  on  those  special  things  which 
he  knows  the  audience  must  have  in  mind  for  the  full 
comprehension  of  his  action.  He  suppresses  rigorously 


180  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

all  the  rest,  however  tempting  they  may  be  in  them- 
selves. He  must  supply  the  spectators  with  exactly 
the  information  they  will  need  to  apprehend  the  move- 
ment of  the  plot,  no  more  and  no  less. 

The  first  desire  of  the  audience  present  at  the  per- 
formance of  a  play  is  to  understand  what  it  is  all  about, 
and  their  second  demand  is  that  the  action  shall  de- 
velop before  their  eyes  so  that  it  can  be  followed  with- 
out effort.  When  two  characters  of  the  play  meet  for  the 
first  time  on  the  stage,  the  spectator  is  glad  if  he  already 
knows  who  they  are,  what  their  relation  is  the  one  to 
the  other,  and  what  they  are  each  of  them  striving  for. 
If  this  information  has  already  been  given  to  him,  he 
can  listen  to  their  dialogue  with  intelligent  interest.  If 
this  information  has  been  withheld,  his  attention  is 
likely  to  be  distracted  by  his  effort  to  place  the  two  char- 
acters and  to  guess  what  they  are  driving  at.  Often 
the  two  characters  can  explain  themselves  in  a  word  or 
two  at  the  beginning  of  their  talk ;  but  often  again  their 
relations  are  more  or  less  complicated,  depending  on 
an  unusual  series  of  antecedent  events.  The  more  in- 
tricate this  complexity  may  be,  the  more  obvious  is 
the  obligation  of  the  playwright  to  set  it  forth  with  the 
utmost  sharpness,  so  that  it  cannot  be  misunderstood. 
A  full  appreciation  of  the  relations  of  the  several  char- 
acters to  each  other  is  a  condition  precedent  to  the 
playgoer's  interest  in  the  action,  as  it  is  unfolded  before 
him. 

In  the  vocabulary  of  stage-craft,  this  conveying  to  the 
audience  of  the  knowledge  necessary  to  enable  them 
to  follow  the  plot  is  known  as  "exposition."  It  is  a 
very  important  part  of  the  art  of  construction.  It  is 
one  of  the  tests  by  which  we  can  gage  the  dexterity 


THE  LOGIC   OF  CONSTRUCTION         181 

of  a  dramatist,  and  by  which  we  can  measure  his  com- 
mand over  the  resources  of  his  craft.  Some  play- 
wrights have  to  perfection  a  knack  of  taking  the  play- 
goer right  into  the  middle  of  things  in  the  opening 
scenes  of  the  first  act,  with  a  simplicity  apparently  so 
straightforward  that  he  has  never  a  suspicion  of  the 
artfulness  whereby  he  has  been  supplied  with  all  sorts 
of  information  about  the  past  history  of  the  chief  char- 
acters. Some  dramatists  are  careless  and  slovenly  in 
exposition;  and  some  are  leisurely  and  cumbrous. 

But  no  dramatic  author  can  evade  the  necessity  of 
telling  the  audience  all  about  that  portion  of  his  plot 
which  took  place  before  the  curtain  rises  on  his  first 
act.  Sooner  or  later  this  information  must  be  supplied 
somehow.  The  dramatist  can  do  it  in  a  prologue 
which  is  spoken  before  the  play  begins,  as  Plautus  does 
in  the  "  Captives."  He  can  do  it  inside  the  play  in  a 
long  soliloquy  which  is  practically  a  prologue,  as  Eu- 
ripides does  in  "  Medea."  He  can  put  it  into  tense  dia- 
logue supported  by  swift  action  in  the  opening  scenes 
of  the  first  act,  as  Shakspere  does  in  "Othello."  He 
can  postpone  it  for  a  while  and  scatter  it  through  the 
whole  play,  as  Ibsen  does  in  "  Ghosts."  But  he  must 
not  put  it  off  until  it  is  too  late,  as  Ibsen  does  in  "  Ros- 
mersholm,"  where  we  do  not  learn  until  the  final  act 
the  real  motive  which  has  been  guiding  Rebecca  West. 
This  we  should  have  liked  to  know  earlier  in  the  play, 
since  it  would  have  enabled  us  to  perceive  the  trans- 
formation that  had  been  wrought  in  her  character. 

If  we  may  deduce  a  principle  from  the  practice  of 
the  most  expert  playwrights,  we  should  be  led  to  be- 
lieve that  the  best  method  of  exposition  is  to  compress 
it  into  the  first  act,  even  at  the  risk  of  making  the 


182  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

earlier  scenes  a  little  slow  and  labored.  When  they 
first  take  their  seats  in  the  theater,  the  spectators  are 
alert  and  ready  to  seize  even  the  slightest  hint.  They 
have  not  had  time  yet  to  be  tired  and  they  are  there- 
fore less  easily  bored.  Besides,  even  if  they  are  bored 
by  the  first  act,  they  have  paid  their  money  for  the 
evening's  entertainment,  and  therefore  they  can  be 
relied  on  to  stay  where  they  are  and  to  await  patiently 
the  second  act  with  the  firm  hope  that  this  will  turn 
out  to  be  more  interesting. 

This  was  Scribe's  habit,  and  Scribe  was  a  past-master 
of  all  the  mysteries  of  playmaking.  He  massed  all  his 
explanatory  matter  in  the  earliest  scenes  of  his  piece, 
making  everything  transparently  clear,  so  that  even 
the  dullest  and  the  laziest  spectators  could  not  fail  to 
understand  the  situation.  He  brought  his  characters 
into  the  action  one  by  one,  introducing  them  to  the 
audience  carefully  so  that  they  might  always  thereafter 
be  identified.  If  he  thought  it  advisable,  he  did  not 
hesitate  to  give  up  a  whole  act  to  mere  exposition,  well 
aware  that  he  could  recapture  the  full  attention  of  the 
spectators  by  the  celerity  with  which  the  action  would 
go  forward,  after  these  preliminary  explanations  and 
introductions  had  been  got  rid  of.  Thus  it  is  that  in 
"  Adrienne  Lecouvreur,"  he  kept  the  heroine  out  of  the 
opening  act,  in  which  all  the  other  characters  appear 
to  lay  the  foundation  of  the  plot,  and  he  artfully  re- 
served her  first  appearance  to  awaken  fresh  interest 
in  the  second  act. 

Scribe's  contemporary,  the  elder  Dumas,  was  quite 
as  careful  and  as  skilful  in  his  introductory  scenes. 
He  liked  to  begin  briskly,  and  to  combine  his  exposi- 
tion with  the  action  itself.  He  has  told  us  that  he  had 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION          183 

invented  the  story  of  one  of  his  most  successful  plays, 
"Mademoiselle  de  Belle  Isle,"  two  or  three  years  be- 
fore he  was  ready  to  write  it,  postponing  the  actual 
composition  until  he  happened  on  an  effective  open- 
ing. One  day  he  heard  about  a  pair  of  lovers  who  had 
broken  a  coin  in  two,  each  keeping  a  half,  with  the 
understanding  that  when  either  tired  of  the  other,  the 
half-coin  should  be  returned  as  a  token  of  the  end 
of  their  intrigue.  He  seized  on  this  eagerly  and  used 
it  as  the  starting-point  of  the  play  already  completely 
plotted  in  his  head. 

The  younger  Dumas,  the  author  of  the  perennial 
and  pathetic  piece  known  to  American  playgoers  as 
"Camille,"  inherited  from  his  father  a  native  gift  for 
playmaking  and  a  subtle  insight  into  its  conditions.  He 
declared  that  the  art  of  the  dramatist  is  an  art  of  pre- 
paration chiefly,  and  that  every  scene  should  be  led 
up  to  so  adroitly  that  the  spectator  expects  it  vaguely 
and  welcomes  it  warmly.  And  he  had  derived  from 
his  father  also  a  liking  for  a  striking  beginning,  which 
should  grip  the  interest  of  the  audience  at  the  very 
rise  of  the  curtain,  forcing  them  to  perceive  at  once 
and  without  hesitation  the  relations  of  the  chief  char- 
acters to  one  another. 

But  it  is  in  one  of  his  later  and  less  successful  pieces, 
the  "Femme  de  Claude,"  that  he  provides  the  most 
ingenious  specimen  of  his  skill  in  opening  a  play  with 
a  scene  which  is  at  once  explanatory  and  effective  in 
itself.  When  the  curtain  rises,  the  stage  is  dark  and 
the  spectators  can  dimly  perceive  a  room  with  its  shut- 
ters closed.  An  old  servant  enters  with  a  night  lamp, 
which  she  holds  up  to  the  face  of  a  clock;  it  is  morn- 
ing, and  she  is  going  to  let  in  the  dawn.  Then  she 


184  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

hears  a  tapping  at  the  window,  followed  by  a  woman's 
voice,  which  she  recognizes  with  regret.  "  Why  the 
devil  is  she  coming  back?"  she  asks  herself.  "All 
was  going  well  here."  Then  she  throws  wide  the  shut- 
ters and  opens  the  door  for  the  woman  outside.  And 
from  the  brief  dialogue  which  follows,  as  sharp  and  as 
cold  as  the  crossing  of  two  swords  in  a  duel,  the  spec- 
tators learn  that  the  returning  woman  is  the  wander- 
ing wife  of  the  master  of  the  house,  and  in  response 
to  her  questions  as  to  what  has  happened  during  her 
absence,  the  old  servant  sets  before  us  all  of  the  facts 
which  are  necessary  to  interest  us  in  the  strange  play. 

Sardou,  the  contemporary  of  the  younger  Dumas, 
and  the  successor  of  Scribe  as  a  dramaturgic  artificer, 
was  also  ingenious  in  his  expositions.  The  first  act  of 
"  Fedora,"  for  example,  is  a  prologue  which  is  needed 
to  explain  and  to  justify  the  play  it  precedes ;  but  it  is 
also  swift  in  its  action  and  pictorial  in  its  movement ; 
and  when  at  last  the  curtain  falls  on  it,  we  see  that  the 
clever  playwright  ended  it  with  an  interrogation  mark, 
with  a  suggestion  of  suspense  which  keeps  us  in  our 
seats  wondering  what  will  be  the  outcome  of  the  fatal 
episode  we  have  witnessed. 

Often,  however,  Sardou  adopted  another  method, 
as  in  his  earlier  social  satires,  "Nos  Intimes"  and  the 
"Famille  Benoiton,"  and  in  his  later  historical  melo- 
dramas," Theodora"  and  "  Gismonda."  In  these  plays, 
he  used  his  first  act,  and  often  his  second  also,  to  paint 
a  phase  of  society,  modern  or  ancient.  He  brought 
before  us  a  crowd  of  characters,  entertaining  in  them- 
selves and  humorously  contrasted  with  one  another, 
making  amusing  remarks  and  revealing  themselves  in 
amusing  situations.  As  the  play  goes  forward,  the 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         185 

spectator  begins  to  have  his  attention  drawn  to  a  little 
group  of  more  striking  figures ;  and  in  the  later  acts, 
these  figures  take  the  center  of  the  stage,  the  host  of 
merely  pictorial  characters  sinking  into  the  background, 
after  having  served  their  purpose.  It  is  by  means  of 
the  talk  of  these  subsidiary  personages  that  we  have 
been  made  aware  of  the  relations  of  the  really  important 
characters.  In  Sardou's  hands,  this  method  was  em- 
ployed to  advantage ;  but  it  is  dangerous,  since  it  tends 
to  distract  the  attention  of  the  audience  from  the  core 
of  the  real  drama.  For  its  successful  use,  it  requires 
the  marvelous  dexterity  of  a  wizard  of  stage-craft,  such 
as  Sardou  was ;  and  it  was  Sardou's  misfortune  that  his 
delight  in  his  own  skill  as  a  contriver  of  artful  devices 
led  him  too  often  to  be  content  with  a  play  which  is 
only  an  empty  mechanism,  in  which  the  spectators 
can  see  the  wheels  go  round  and  by  which  all  human 
feeling  has  been  crushed  out  of  the  story. 

in 

One  of  the  oldest  devices,  outworn  now  and  long 
ago  discarded  by  self-respecting  dramatists,  is  to  open 
the  play  with  the  conversation  of  two  or  three  servants, 
dusting  the  room  and  setting  the  furniture  to  rights. 
These  domestics  are  allowed  to  inform  the  spectator 
that  it  is  two  years  or  ten  since  master  and  mistress 
quarrelled  and  parted,  and  that  now  husband  and 
wife  are  to  meet  again  for  the  first  time  since  their 
separation.  Equally  ancient  is  the  obvious  artifice  of 
beginning  the  piece  by  compelling  one  character  to  tell 
another  what  that  character  already  knows.  The  ar- 
tificiality of  this  seems  to  us  now  a  little  too  transpar- 
ent. Yet  Dryden  did  not  scorn  to  employ  it  more  than 


186  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

once,  notably  in  his  "Spanish  Friar,"  which  begins 
with  the  meeting  of  two  officers  at  night  who  repeat 
aloud  what  each  of  them  is  already  familiar  with. 
It  is  no  wonder  that  Sheridan  saw  the  absurdity  of  this 
threadbare  convention  and  made  fun  of  it  in  the  bur- 
lesque tragedy  which  is  rehearsed  in  the  "  Critic." 

And  yet  the  audience  must  be  told  somehow,  and 
even  the  clumsiest  exposition  is  better  than  leaving  the 
spectator  in  the  dark.  In  the  drama,  as  in  all  the  other 
arts,  simplicity  is  the  best  policy;  and  that  exposition 
is  most  satisfactory  which  is  at  once  straightforward, 
and  swift  and  clear.  This  is  what  every  great  dra- 
matist has  tried  to  attain,  well  aware  that  it  cannot 
be  achieved  without  taking  thought.  The  principles 
of  dramatic  art  are  unchanging  through  the  ages, 
and  ^Eschylus  in  Athens,  Shakspere  in  London,  and 
Moliere  in  Paris,  had  to  solve  the  same  problem  that 
Scribe  and  Sardou  had  to  struggle  with  in  their  turn. 
Each  of  them,  in  his  own  fashion,  had  to  take  the  au- 
dience into  the  heart  of  his  story,  supplying  the  inform- 
ation necessary  for  its  appreciation  as  best  he  could. 

^Eschylus  opens  his  masterpiece,  "Agamemnon," 
with  a  watchman  on  the  roof  of  the  palace,  waiting  for 
the  fiery  beacon  which  shall  announce  the  fall  of  Troy ; 
and  as  he  waits,  he  delivers  a  long  soliloquy  conveying 
to  the  spectators  the  needful  knowledge  of  the  state  of 
affairs  which  the  returning  hero  will  find  when  he 
comes  back  to  his  long-deserted  home.  Moliere  opens 
his  masterpiece,  "  Tartuffe,"  with  a  piquant  discussion 
of  the  character  of  the  hypocritical  intruder,  which 
strikes  the  note  of  the  play  and  which  prepares  us  for 
all  that  follows.  Goethe  said  that  the  first  scene  of 
"Tartuffe"  is  "the  greatest  and  best  example  of  an 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION          187 

introduction  which  shows  the  significance  and  impor- 
tance of  what  is  to  come  " ;  and  he  declared  that  Moliere 
was  "the  man  from  whom  most  about  the  technic  of 
the  modern  drama  can  be  learned."  And  yet  Moliere 
was  sometimes  bold  in  employing  more  primitive 
methods  of  exposition,  not  hesitating  to  begin  a  play 
by  sending  on  a  character  to  make  a  soliloquy  in  which 
the  situation  is  set  forth  boldly. 

Shakspere  was  careful  in  the  exposition  of  his  ear- 
lier pieces,  both  comic  and  tragic.  He  plunges  into  the 
thick  of  his  story  in  the  opening  scene  of  "Othello," 
in  which  he  shows  us  lago  waking  Desdemona's  father, 
with  the  unwelcome  news  that  the  daughter  of  a  Vene- 
tian patrician  has  married  a  Moor.  And  he  follows  this 
with  the  meeting  of  the  Senators,  where  Othello  is  called 
upon  to  tell  the  story  of  his  wooing.  When  the  first  act 
of  the  play  is  over,  we  know  all  that  we  need  to  know, 
and  our  attention  has  been  kept  keenly  on  the  alert, 
while  we  are  eager  to  be  told  how  the  strange  marriage 
will  turn  out.  Equally  ingenious  and  effective  is  the 
first  act  of  "  Romeo  and  Juliet,"  in  the  opening  scene 
of  which  we  find  the  feud  between  the  Montagues  and 
the  Capulets  so  embittered  that  it  breaks  out  into  a  street 
brawl.  And  then,  when  this  envenomed  quarrel  has 
been  shown  unforgettably,  we  are  allowed  to  be  wit- 
nesses of  the  love-at-first-sight  of  the  son  of  one  house 
for  the  daughter  of  the  other. 

It  is  characteristic  of  the  incisive  but  often  hap- 
hazard criticism  of  Hazlitt  that  he  casually  dismissed 
the  "Comedy  of  Errors"  as  a  careless  piece  of  work. 
Now,  it  is  a  fact  that  Shakspere,  who  was  capable  of 
an  infinity  of  pains  in  handling  his  plot  when  his  theme 
had  kindled  his  interest,  was  careless  enough  in  the 


188  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

construction  of  some  of  his  later  pieces,  in  "Cymbe- 
line"  especially,  and  in  the  "Winter's  Tale.""  But 
there  are  few  evidences  of  this  relaxing  of  his  artistic 
standard  in  his  earlier  plays,  and  none  at  all  in  the 
"Comedy  of  Errors."  Indeed,  careless  is  just  what 
this  play  is  not  and  just  what  it  could  not  be,  since  it 
depends  entirely  on  the  adjustment  of  its  mechanism. 
It  is  only  a  farce,  after  all,  inferior,  and  perhaps  un- 
worthy of  the  hand  that  was  to  give  us  "  Othello"  and 
"  Macbeth."  Like  other  farces,  it  has  to  rely  not  on  the 
humor  and  the  veracity  of  its  characters,  but  on  the 
adroitness  of  its  situations.  It  stands  revealed  frankly 
as  farce  when  we  examine  its  plot,  which  is  patently 
impossible,  since  it  requires  us  to  accept  the  existence 
of  two  pairs  of  twins  so  alike  in  looks,  in  speech,  in 
manner,  and  even  in  costume  that  they  can  be  con- 
stantly taken  the  one  for  the  other,  in  spite  of  their 
having  been  brought  up  in  different  places. 

That  the  spectators  may  get  amusement  out  of  the 
various  mistaken  identities  which  make  up  the  plot, 
it  is  absolutely  essential  that  they  should  be  told  plainly, 
at  the  very  beginning,  all  about  the  two  sets  of  twins, 
and  that  they  should  have  explained  to  them  the  strange 
combination  of  circumstances  which  has  resulted  in 
bringing  both  pairs  of  brothers  together  unexpectedly 
in  the  same  city,  the  one  master  and  his  servant  hav- 
ing every  reason  to  believe  that  the  other  master  and 
the  other  servant  have  been  lost  at  sea.  To  tell  these 
things  so  that  there  shall  be  no  doubt  about  them  is 
no  easy  task ;  and  Shakspere  accomplished  it  with  ab- 
solute certainty  and  with  perfect  apprehension  of  dra- 
matic effect.  He  opened  his  play  with  a  hearing  before 
the  Duke,  who  is  judging  the  case  of  the  father  of  the 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         189 

two  young  masters.  This  bereaved  parent  has  come 
to  seek  his  missing  son,  and  in  so  doing  he  has  violated 
the  local  law  against  strangers.  He  pleads  as  his  ex- 
cuse his  paternal  love  for  his  lost  child.  Thus  the  whole 
story  of  the  two  pairs  of  twins,  of  their  birth  and  of 
their  separation,  of  their  survival  each  unknown  to 
the  other,  —  all  this  is  set  forth  in  the  speech  of  an  old 
man  on  trial  for  his  life,  a  situation  which  instantly 
arouses  the  sympathy  of  the  audience  and  secures  their 
unflagging  attention. 

We  can  see  one  reason  for  Shakspere's  extreme  care- 
fulness in  exposition  when  we  recall  the  fact  that  more 
than  half  of  the  Elizabethan  playgoers  were  not  pro- 
vided with  seats.  The  groundlings,  as  they  were  called, 
had  to  stand  all  through  the  performance,  and  they 
could  not  help  being  more  restless  and  therefore  less 
alert  to  follow  the  explanations  of  the  author  than  if 
they  had  been  comfortably  seated.  But  even  if  they 
were  a  little  restless  at  times,  the  audiences  for  whose 
delight  Shakspere  composed  his  plays  were  quick 
enough  to  seize  and  to  appreciate  what  the  dramatist 
gave  them.  Here  Shakspere  was  far  more  fortunate 
than  Plautus  who  had  to  amuse  the  Roman  populace, 
made  up  of  freedmen  and  of  foreigners,  the  riffraff  and 
the  rabble  of  the  city,  often  only  imperfectly  acquainted 
with  Latin.  In  his  "Captives,"  Plautus  dealt  with  a 
story  the  beginnings  of  which  are  rather  complicated, 
although  not  really  so  intricate  and  so  difficult  to  ex- 
plain as  the  antecedents  of  the  characters  in  the  "  Com- 
edy of  Errors."  The  Roman  playwright  evidently  had 
no  confidence  in  the  intelligence  or  in  the  attention 
of  his  audience ;  and  so  he  took  no  chances.  He  did 
not  dare  develop  the  relations  of  his  characters  in  the 


190  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

play  itself  until  he  had  made  use  of  a  prologue,  in 
which  the  whole  situation  is  elaborately  explained  so 
that  even  the  dullest  must  get  hold  of  it.  Nor  did  this 
satisfy  him;  he  made  the  speaker  of  the  prologue  in- 
sist on  his  explanation  two  or  three  times  over,  until 
it  was  driven  into  the  heads  of  the  spectators,  however 
stupid  they  might  be.  And  no  doubt  this  extreme 
emphasis  of  exposition  was  only  what  was  absolutely 
necessary  under  the  circumstances. 

It  is  difficult  always  for  a  dramatist  to  gage  the  aver- 
age intelligence  of  his  successive  audiences.  What  is 
only  explanation  enough  for  one  set  of  spectators  may 
be  undue  insistence  on  the  obvious  for  another.  And 
the  wise  playwright  is  ready  to  risk  offending  the  quick- 
minded  few  to  make  sure  of  the  understanding  of  the 
slow-witted  many.  Planche  records  the  advice  given 
to  him  early  in  the  nineteenth  century  by  a  sagacious 
old  stage-manager  named  Bartley.  "  If  you  want  the 
British  public  to  understand  what  you  are  doing," 
this  shrewd  observer  declared,  "you  must  tell  them 
that  you  are  going  to  do  it;  then  you  must  tell  them 
that  you  are  doing  it ;  and  after  all  you  must  tell  them 
that  you  have  done  it.  And  then,  confound  them, 
perhaps  they  will  understand  you." 

IV 

This  is  a  hard  saying,  yet  it  contains  much  wisdom. 
Especially  is  it  important  for  the  playwright  to  tell 
the  spectators  what  he  is  going  to  do,  —  or  at  least  to 
evoke  the  interest  of  expectancy  and  to  lead  them 
vaguely  to  desire  what  he  is  about  to  set  before  them. 
In  prose-fiction,  it  is  possible  to  captivate  readers  by 
keeping  a  secret  from  them,  disclosed  only  at  the  most 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         191 

impressive  moment.  In  fact,  the  effect  of  the  detective- 
story  depends  solely  on  this  device ;  the  author  invents 
an  enigma  and  he  tries  to  keep  us  guessing  until  the 
last  page.  And  even  novelists  of  a  richer  endowment, 
possessing  true  imagination  in  addition  to  mere  in- 
vention (which  is  all  that  the  writer  of  mystery-tales 
needs),  novelists  like  Fielding  and  Thackeray,  may 
legitimately  leave  us  in  doubt  for  a  little  while,  and 
reveal  the  secret  of  the  birth  of  Tom  Jones  and  of 
Henry  Esmond  only  when  they  see  fit.  But  this  the  nov- 
elists may  do  because  their  unhurried  reader  can  take 
time  to  think.  And  this  the  dramatist  cannot  do.  One 
of  the  first  rules  of  the  stage  is  not  to  keep  a  secret 
from  the  spectators.  The  failure  of  Charles  Lamb's 
"Mr.  H."  was  more  or  less  due  to  the  circumstance 
that  the  misguided  author  chose  to  conceal  the  real 
name,  of  which  his  hero  was  ashamed,  not  only  from 
the  other  characters  in  the  little  farce,  but  also  from  the 
audience.  The  spectators  must  know  the  facts,  even 
though  the  characters  may  be  left  groping  in  the  dark 
until  the  last  act.  Indeed,  the  audience  finds  special 
pleasure  in  the  perplexity  of  the  people  in  the  play ;  it 
wonders  what  will  happen  when  Othello  discovers  the 
villainy  of  lago,  or  when  Sir  Peter  Teazle  finds  out  that 
Joseph  Surface  is  a  hypocrite. 

In  Mrs.  Oliphant's  uninspired  biography  of  the  au- 
thor of  the  "  School  for  Scandal,"  she  exhibited  her 
total  failure  to  grasp  this  principle.  Herself  a  success- 
ful writer  of  prose-fiction,  she  had  no  understanding 
of  the  fundamental  differences  which  necessarily  exist 
between  the  art  of  the  novelist  and  the  art  of  the 
dramatist.  When  she  came  to  deal  with  the  screen- 
scene  of  the  "School  for  Scandal,"  one  of  the  most 


192  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

effective  episodes  in  the  whole  range  of  comedy,  she 
was  guilty  of  a  masterpiece  of  undramatic  criticism. 
Sir  Peter  has  come  to  the  library  of  Joseph  and  he  is 
told  that  there  is  a  little  milliner  hidden  behind  the 
screen  which  stands  before  the  window ;  and  suddenly, 
when  this  screen  is  overturned,  he  finds  himself  face 
to  face  with  his  own  wife.  And  then  Mrs.  Oliphant 
made  this  hopeless  comment :  "  It  would  no  doubt  have 
been  higher  art  could  the  dramatist  have  deceived  his 
audience  as  well  as  the  personages  of  the  play,  and 
made  us  also  parties  in  the  surprise  of  the  discovery." 
That  is  to  say,  she  would  have  substituted  a  single 
shock  of  astonishment  for  the  long-drawn  series  of  an- 
ticipations aroused  in  the  spectators,  from  the  moment 
of  the  husband's  entrance,  by  their  knowledge  that  it 
was  Lady  Teazle  who  was  hidden  behind  the  screen. 
The  playgoer  likes  to  exercise  his  ingenuity  and  to 
foresee  what  is  about  to  happen  on  the  stage.  In  fact, 
his  interest  is  really  not  so  much  in  what  is  to  happen 
as  the  way  in  which  this  event  is  going  to  affect  the 
characters  involved.  He  thinks  it  likely  enough  that 
Sir  Peter  will  discover  that  Lady  Teazle  is  paying  a 
visit  to  Joseph  Surface ;  but  what  he  is  really  anxious 
to  learn  is  the  way  the  husband  will  take  it.  What 
will  Lady  Teazle  have  to  say  when  she  is  discovered 
where  she  has  no  business  to  be  ?  How  will  Sir  Peter 
receive  her  excuses  ?  What  will  the  effect  be  on  the 
future  conduct  of  both  husband  and  wife  ?  These  are 
the  questions  which  the  spectators  are  eager  to  have 
answered.  The  dramatist  may  excite  curiosity  by  all 
sorts  of  ingenious  devices,  but  he  must  never  deceive 
the  spectators.  He  may  keep  them  in  suspense  or  in 
doubt,  but  he  must  not  absolutely  mislead  them. 


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THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         193 

Even  in  prose-fiction,  the  impression  made  by  a 
startling  surprise  is  only  fleeting.  When  we  have  once 
been  granted  an  explanation  of  the  mysterious  deeds, 
our  curiosity  is  satisfied ;  and  the  book  is  rarely  taken 
up  a  second  time.  Few  of  us  ever  care  to  peruse  a  tale 
of  Wilkie  Collins  after  we  have  once  found  out  the 
key  of  the  puzzle,  although  we  may  return  again  and 
again  to  Tom  Jones  and  to  Henry  Esmond,  following 
the  career  of  either  with  renewed  interest,  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  we  are  in  possession  of  the  secret  of  his 
birth.  Poe  was  very  shrewd  when  he  asserted  that 
"Barnaby  Rudge"  would  have  been  more  interesting 
if  Dickens  had  eschewed  all  mystery-mongering.  In 
the  drama,  our  knowledge  of  the  end  of  a  play  in  no 
wise  interferes  with  our  enjoyment.  We  go  to  see  the 
"School  for  Scandal"  and  "Othello,"  whenever  they 
are  properly  presented,  regardless  of  the  fact  that  the 
end  is  familiar  in  advance.  We  are  glad  to  have  new 
dramatists  handle  again  the  old  themes,  "Francesca 
da  Rimini,"  and  "  Faust,"  curious  to  observe  the  vari- 
ations which  the  younger  generations  can  play  on  the 
*old  tune  we  have  known  from  our  own  youth.  In  this, 
we  are  like  the  Greeks  of  old,  the  Athenians  who,  in 
spite  of  their  longing  to  hear  some  new  thing,  con- 
tented themselves  in  the  theater  with  the  traditional 
stories  which  every  dramatist  took  over  in  turn,  trans- 
forming them  to  suit  his  own  genius. 

Here,  as  in  all  matters  of  art,  the  Greeks  displayed 
their  good  sense.  Novelty  of  plot  is  possible  only 
within  narrow  limits ;  and  every  dramatist  has  to  bor- 
row again  the  situations  which  were  the  common 
property  of  his  predecessors.  Gozzi,  the  Italian  play- 
wright, once  declared  that  there  were  only  thirty- 


194  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

six  possible  situations ;  and  when  Goethe  and  Schiller 
tried  to  catalogue  them,  they  could  not  find  even 
thirty-six.  There  was  truth  of  a  kind  in  the  school- 
boy's definition  of  a  plagiarist  as  "  a  writer  of  plays." 
The  dramatist  must  be  forever  working  over  old  ma- 
terial, since  there  is  nothing  new  under  the  sun.  But 
if  the  situations  he  can  use  are  very  few,  the  char- 
acters he  may  create  are  without  number.  Human 
nature  is  infinitely  various,  and  the  playwright  has  un- 
limited credit  when  he  is  drawing  a  draft  on  our  com- 
mon humanity.  His  plot  may  be  as  old  as  the  hills, 
if  he  can  only  people  it  with  lovers  as  young  as  the 
springtime,  with  men  and  women  eternally  fresh  be- 
cause they  are  true  to  life.  Brisk  young  fellows  had 
wooed  coy  maids  in  many  a  comedy  before  Orlando 
and  Rosalind  met  again  in  the  Forest  of  Arden,  and 
Orestes  had  set  out  to  avenge  his  murdered  father  cen- 
turies ere  the  same  burden  was  too  heavily  laid  on 
Hamlet. 

The  plot  is  only  the  frame  in  which  the  portrait  is 
suspended,  even  though  plotting  is  more  essential  than 
character-drawing.  The  ultimate  value  of  the  situations 
is  that  they  enable  the  dramatist  to  reveal  human  na- 
ture. And  this  is  one  reason  why  dramatists  of  high 
distinction  have  sometimes  seemed  careless  in  winding 
up  their  plays.  Of  course,  every  playwright  must  work 
out  the  end  of  his  piece  before  he  writes  his  first  line. 
Until  he  knows  just  where  he  is  going,  he  cannot  set  out 
on  his  journey,  since  he  has  no  leisure  for  a  false  start. 
And  yet  this  goal  to  which  he  is  journeying  may  be 
arbitrarily  chosen,  and  when  it  arrives  it  may  seem 
illogical  or  even  contradictory. 

It  is  difficult  to  exaggerate  the  necessity  of  an  expo- 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         195 

sition  so  clear  that  no  misunderstanding  is  possible 
even  on  the  part  of  a  preoccupied  spectator.  The  be- 
ginning of  a  play  is  really  more  important  than  the  end, 
although  in  strict  logic  the  proper  untying  of  the  knot 
would  seem  to  be  the  more  necessary.  But  if  an  au- 
dience has  sat  for  three  hours,  following  with  keen  en- 
joyment the  successive  episodes  of  a  conflict  between 
forces  evenly  balanced,  it  does  not  insist  upon  logic; 
it  is  often  better  pleased  to  have  the  knot  cut  arbitrarily 
than  to  be  delayed  by  the  process  of  untying.  It  has  had 
its  pleasure,  pressed  down  and  running  over ;  and  it  is 
not  churlish  in  denying  to  the  author  the  privilege  of 
finishing  off  the  play  as  he  thinks  fit.  The  play  itself 
is  what  counts,  not  the  way  the  story  is  made  to  end. 
The  picture  of  life  is  what  the  spectators  have  enjoyed ; 
and  they  do  not  —  or  at  least  the  most  of  them  do  not  — 
care  what  moral  may  be  tagged  to  the  fable  by  which 
they  have  been  entertained.  Perhaps  this  is  one  reason 
why  Shakspere  and  Moliere  are  sometimes  so  casual  in 
the  winding  up  of  their  plots,  as  though  they  were  ad- 
mitting that  since  in  real  life  nothing  ever  comes  to  an 
end,  so  on  the  stage,  even  if  an  end  of  some  sort  is  asked 
for,  one  end  is  about  as  good  as  another. 

The  modern  playgoer  prefers  a  happy  ending.  He 
has  a  fondness  for  the  old-fashioned  fairy-tale  finish, 
"  and  so  they  lived  happily  ever  after."  It  is  only  in 
opera  that  he  is  willing  to  tolerate  the  sadness  of  death, 
He  is  not  like  the  playgoer  of  Athens  who  seems  to  have 
expected  always  to  see  the  doom  fulfilled  and  fate  ac- 
complished. And  this  is  not  a  recent  trait  of  the  play- 
goer's temperament;  we  can  find  an  earlier  yielding 
to  this  in  the  marrying  off  in  the  last  acts  of  "  Measure 
for  Measure,"  for  example,  when  that  gloomy  play 


196  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

demanded  a  more  serious  conclusion.  And  Moliere 
not  only  brought  Tartuffe  to  justice,  but  also  took  the 
trouble  to  restore  the  fortune  of  Orgon,  which  is  in  the 
nature  of  a  concession  to  this  predilection  of  the  pub- 
lic for  a  pleasing  solution.  So  Mr.  Gillette,  in  his  "  Secret 
Service,"  an  admirable  play  in  its  veracity  as  well  as 
in  its  ingenuity,  carried  us  straight  to  the  tragic  end 
which  is  the  only  logical  issue  of  the  circumstances 
and  the  characters,  —  and  then,  at  the  culmination, 
when  the  prompter's  hand  was  on  the  bell  to  ring 
down  the  curtain,  the  author  suddenly  reprieved  his 
hero  and  married  him  off  in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye. 
The  effect  is  as  though  the  dramatist  was  saying  to  the 
audience,  "  Of  course,  this  play  is  a  tragedy,  and  it 
cannot  really  be  anything  else,  but,  if  most  of  you  insist 
on  a  happy  ending,  you  may  have  it  your  own  way ! " 
It  is  true  that  there  had  been  so  much  comedy  here 
and  there  in  "Secret  Service"  that  the  spectators  were 
not  ready  to  take  the  play  as  a  tragedy. 

Such  a  violation  of  logic  would  have  been  very  offen- 
sive to  the  younger  Dumas,  who  was  stern  in  his  in- 
sistence that  the  plot  of  a  play  ought  to  be  like  a  mathe- 
matical demonstration.  The  conclusion  must  be  the 
sum  total,  the  working  out,  of  all  the  other  scenes.  This 
principle  is  sound  enough  when  it  is  applied  to  Dumas's 
own  pieces  in  which  he  was  defending  a  thesis  or  ex- 
pounding his  own  opinions.  It  is  sound  when  applied 
to  the  social-drama  of  Ibsen,  sustained  by  a  moral 
proposition.  In  the  social-drama,  the  playwright  is 
bound  to  be  honest  with  himself  and  with  the  audience. 
He  has  then  no  right  to  be  illogical,  for  logic  is  of  the 
essence  of  the  contract,  as  the  lawyers  say.  He  must 
keep  faith  with  the  spectators,  since  he  is  presenting 


THE  LOGIC   OF  CONSTRUCTION         197 

to  us  a  sociological  problem  and  inviting  us  to  accept 
his  solution  of  it.  But  in  the  comedy-of-character  and 
in  the  comedy-of -manners,  no  such  obligation  is  really 
imposed  on  the  playwright.  In  the  plays  of  these  allied 
types,  the  dramatist  has  no  thesis  to  sustain,  no  private 
opinion  to  parade ;  and  he  is  content  to  set  before  us  a 
group  of  human  beings  whom  he  puts  through  their 
paces,  whom  he  turns  inside  out  before  us.  And  when 
he  has  done  this,  he  has  accomplished  his  purpose,  and 
the  play  can  be  wound  up  summarily  by  the  customary 
wedding  bells. 

v 

This  license  allowed  him  at  the  termination  of  his 
work,  the  playwright  sometimes  asks  for  in  the  middle 
also;  and  here  he  is  on  dangerous  ground,  where  he 
must  move  circumspectly,  picking  his  way  cautiously. 
It  must  be  ever  his  chief  aim  to  make  his  work  appear 
as  "  natural "  as  may  be ;  and  his  art  is  held  in  the  high- 
est esteem  only  when  he  is  able  to  avoid  not  only  the 
extravagant  and  the  arbitrary,  but  even  the  accidental. 
It  should  be  his  constant  endeavor  so  to  present  the  re- 
sult of  his  loving  labor  that  it  can  be  apprehended  and 
appreciated  with  as  little  effort  as  possible.  This  is  a 
quality  of  sculpture  and  of  painting,  when  these  arts 
are  at  their  best.  It  is  a  characteristic  more  especially 
of  those  literary  arts  in  which  the  poet  undertakes  to 
tell  a  story  either  in  drama  or  in  prose-fiction.  Whether 
the  story-teller  is  setting  his  tale  in  action  on  the  stage, 
or  presenting  it  in  narrative  in  verse  or  in  prose,  he  is 
bound  to  do  his  best  to  give  the  utmost  verisimilitude 
to  the  series  of  events  to  which  he  is  inviting  the  atten- 
tion of  the  spectator  or  the  reader.  In  planning  his  plot, 
he  must  endeavor  to  make  these  events  coherent  and 


198  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

clear  and  complete  in  themselves.  He  can  do  this  only 
by  isolating  them  from  all  the  other  events  which  have 
been  taking  place  at  the  same  time.  From  out  of  the 
tumultuous  turmoil  of  existence,  he  must  select  a  se- 
quence of  happenings  to  which  he  has  to  give  a  sem- 
blance of  unity;  and  he  chooses  this  particular  chain 
of  events,  and  not  any  other,  because  he  can  see  in  it 
a  significance  worthy  of  artistic  presentation. 

These  actions  of  certain  characters  plucked  out  from 
the  tangled  web  of  real  life  he  has  to  set  by  themselves ; 
he  has  to  condense  them  and  to  relate  them  logically; 
he  has  to  keep  out  all  extraneous  and  casual  circum- 
stances not  bearing  directly  upon  them.  Only  by  this 
process  of  exclusion  is  he  able  to  focus  attention  upon 
the  group  he  has  determined  to  show  us.  He  is  com- 
pelled to  neglect  and  deliberately  to  leave  out  of  ac- 
count all  the  other  persons  then  going  about  their  busi- 
ness anywhere  in  the  world  at  large.  It  is  his  duty  so 
to  deal  with  this  group  of  picked  men  and  women  that 
their  deeds  shall  seem  to  be  determined  by  themselves 
and  by  themselves  only,  unaffected  by  what  might  be 
done  by  outsiders. 

Here,  of  course,  the  artist  has  to  depart  from  the 
mere  facts  of  life  as  we  all  see  them ;  and  by  tacit  agree- 
ment, the  spectators  authorize  him  to  make  this  de- 
parture. In  life,  there  are  no  groups  of  human  beings 
detached  from  their  fellows,  sufficient  unto  themselves 
and  uninfluenced  by  the  rest  of  humanity.  We  cannot 
help  knowing  that  every  man  and  every  woman  is  eter- 
nally immeshed  in  the  intricate  complexity  of  existence, 
and  that  we  are  all  of  us  affected  by  the  myriad  move- 
ments of  our  fellow-creatures.  And  yet  when  we  are 
spectators  at  a  play,  or  readers  of  a  novel,  we  not  only 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         199 

permit  this  departure  from  the  circumstances  of  actual 
life,  we  demand  it  absolutely.  We  are  eager  to  have  the 
artist  profit  by  the  convention  proper  to  his  art. 

What  we  desire  from  the  artist  is  not  the  exact  fact, 
but  the  underlying  truth,  of  which  the  several  facts 
are  only  the  external  accompaniment.  We  want  him 
to  choose  his  little  knot  of  characters  and  to  segregate 
them  from  out  the  mass  of  their  fellow-beings,  that 
we  may  the  more  easily  follow  the  story  he  is  ready  to 
set  before  us.  It  is  this  isolated  action  of  an  isolated 
group  of  characters  that  we  want  to  see.  And  we  are 
swift  to  praise  the  artist  for  the  skill  with  which  he  can 
depart  from  the  actual  to  give  us  what  we  are  glad 
to  accept  as  the  real.  As  Victor  Hugo  insisted  in  the 
preface  of  "Cromwell,"  the  "domain  of  art  and  the 
domain  of  nature  are  absolutely  distinct,"  since  a  re- 
ality in  art  is  and  must  be  different  from  a  reality  in 
nature. 

The  dramatist  and  the  novelist  demand  from  the 
public  the  permission  to  select  what  they  prefer,  to  ar- 
range this  as  they  may  see  fit,  and  to  leave  out  all  that 
they  have  no  immediate  use  for;  and  they  do  this  so 
that  the  public  shall  be  called  upon  to  give  its  atten- 
tion only  to  a  single  group  of  characters  taking  part  in 
a  single  sequence  of  events,  logically  related  the  one 
to  the  other,  and  moving  forward  without  any  inter- 
ruption from  the  outside  world  and  without  any  ob- 
trusion of  chance.  And  this  the  public  gladly  allows, 
hoping  to  see  in  the  story,  whether  it  is  on  the  stage 
or  in  a  book,  the  working  out  of  a  single  notion,  taken 
by  itself,  naked  of  non-essentials,  and  uncontaminated 
by  external  accidents  such  as  occur  commonly  enough 
in  actual  life. 


200  A  STUDY  OF  THE   DRAMA 

In  childhood ,  we  can  be  amused  easily  by  tales  of  the 
Impossible  and  of  the  Improbable ;  and  most  of  us  never 
outgrow  this  childishness.  But  as  we  advance  in  years 
and  in  wisdom  and  in  knowledge  of  the  world,  many 
of  us  become  more  exacting ;  and  we  insist  that  the  au- 
thor who  wants  our  regard  shall  not  stray  too  widely 
from  the  Probable.  A  few  of  us  will  go  so  far  as  to  be- 
stow our  warmest  welcome  on  the  writer  who  seeks  to 
deal  only  with  the  Inevitable,  and  who  tries  resolutely 
to  tell  the  truth  about  his  characters  and  to  let  them 
obey  the  law  of  their  being,  doing  only  what  they  must 
do  and  eschewing  everything  that  they  would  not  do 
if  they  were  left  to  themselves. 

We  hold  those  plays  and  those  novels  to  be  the  finest 
and  the  most  enduring  in  which  we  are  made  to  feel 
that  nothing  has  happened  by  accident  or  because  the 
author  himself  intervened  at  the  critical  moment,  and 
in  which  every  action  of  every  character  is  what  it  is 
because  it  could  not  be  otherwise,  if  the  conditions 
are  what  they  have  been  represented.  This  ultimate 
truth,  this  abiding  veracity,  this  inexorable  inevitabil- 
ity, is  what  we  are  delighted  to  proclaim  in  most  of  the 
mightier  masterpieces  of  literature  —  in  the  "  CEdipus" 
of  Sophocles,  in  the  "Macbeth"  of  Shakspere,  in  the 
"Tartuffe"  of  Moliere,  —  and  also  in  the  "Heart  of 
Midlothian"  of  Scott,  in  the  "Scarlet  Letter"  of 
Hawthorne,  in  the  "  Smoke"  of  Turgenieff,  and  in  the 
"Anna  Karenina"  of  Tolstoy. 

While  both  the  novelist  and  the  dramatist  are  held 
strictly  accountable  to  this  ethical  standard  and  are 
both  of  them  bound  to  tell  the  truth  as  they  see  it,  the 
playwright  has  a  more  difficult  task  esthetically  than 
the  story-teller.  His  explanations  have  to  be  summary, 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         201 

and  the  deeds  of  his  characters  must  speak  for  them- 
selves. It  is  always  difficult  for  the  dramatist,  and  in- 
deed it  is  not  always  possible  for  him,  to  make  his  plot 
as  clear  and  as  swift  as  it  ought  to  be,  without  a  single 
intervention  of  chance  or  a  single  deed  which  is  not  the 
spontaneous  result  of  the  individual  will  of  the  char- 
acter who  performs  it.  While  we  have  a  right  to  demand 
from  the  leisurely  novelist  a  strict  obedience  to  the 
letter  of  the  law,  we  are  inclined  to  relax  the  code  now 
and  again  for  the  benefit  of  the  dramatist.  And  the  evi- 
dence that  we  are  not  so  severe  with  the  playwright  as 
with  the  story-teller  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  we 
tolerantly  overlook  in  more  than  one  of  the  great  plays 
the  intervention  of  chance  or  the  obtrusion  of  the  arbi- 
trary, which  we  should  be  much  less  likely  to  pardon 
in  a  story  claiming  equal  rank. 

For  example,  "  Romeo  and  Juliet"  is  a  tragedy,  and 
in  a  tragedy  nothing  ought  to  be  left  to  chance  and 
everything  ought  to  be  the  result  of  the  volition  of  the 
various  characters.  And  yet  we  cannot  help  seeing 
that  the  fatal  termination  of  the  story,  seemingly  in- 
herent in  the  deadly  feud  of  the  rival  houses,  is  brought 
about  at  last  by  what  is  only  an  accident.  If  Friar  Lau- 
rence had  but  thought  of  the  device  of  the  potion  two 
minutes  earlier,  before  Romeo  parted  from  Juliet  in 
the  cell,  or  if  only  the  letter  Friar  Laurence  sent  after 
Romeo  to  Mantua  had  not  miscarried,  then  Romeo 
would  have  known  that  Juliet  was  not  dead  but  sleep- 
ing ;  he  would  not  have  taken  poison ;  and  Juliet  would 
not  have  been  glad  to  die  on  his  dead  body.  A  recent 
commentator  has  made  bold  to  defend  this  as  a  subtle 
touch  of  Shakspere's  art,  in  that  it  serves  to  remind 
us  of  the  large  part  which  chance  plays  in  all  human 


202  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

affairs.  Ingenious  as  this  defence  may  be,  it  is  radi- 
cally unsound,  since  it  confuses  the  reality  of  nature 
with  the  reality  of  art. 

The  reason  why  this  obtrusion  of  accident  into  this 
tragedy  of  Shakspere's  does  not  shock  us,  or  even  an- 
noy us,  is  twofold.  In  the  first  place,  we  cannot  help 
feeling  that  doom  is  ever  impending  over  the  ill-starred 
lovers,  and  that  even  if  Romeo  had  known  about  the 
potion,  something  else  would  assuredly  have  brought 
about  the  unavoidable  end.  And  in  the  second  place, 
Shakspere  very  adroitly  wastes  little  time  on  explaining 
why  the  letter  failed  to  reach  Romeo.  Indeed,  the  let- 
ter is  something  we  do  not  see ;  it  is  something  that  we 
are  merely  told  about.  Now,  in  the  theater  nothing 
grips  our  attention  except  what  is  actually  shown  to 
us.  What  is  talked  about  makes  little  or  no  impression ; 
the  empty  words  go  in  one  ear  and  out  the  other.  And 
nobody  knew  this  better  than  Shakspere. 

In  "Romeo  and  Juliet,"  the  plot  ends  as  it  does  be- 
cause of  an  accident,  which  is  indisputably  arbitrary. 
In  certain  other  of  Shakspere's  plays,  the  action  is 
what  it  is,  because  one  or  another  of  the  characters  acts 
arbitrarily,  not  of  his  own  accord,  but  solely  because 
the  poet  compels  him  to  this  deed  that  the  plot  can  be 
carried  on.  If  this  arbitrary  character  is  one  of  the 
important  personages  of  the  play,  then  this  act  of  his 
focuses  our  attention  and  we  cannot  help  noticing  it. 
But  if  this  arbitrary  character  is  unimportant  in  him- 
self, we  pay  little  heed  to  him,  and  we  may  even  not  note 
his  departure  from  truth.  In  the  first  case,  the  falsity 
of  his  conduct  is  so  paraded  that  the  interest  of  the 
play  suffers,  whereas  in  the  second  case,  we  are  so 
taken  up  in  following  the  fortunes  of  the  vital  figures, 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         203 

that  we  pay  no  heed  to  the  misdeeds  of  the  minor  char- 
acters, who  exist  merely  to  work  the  plot. 

In  "As  You  Like  It,"  for  instance, the  conduct  of  the 
usurping  Duke  and  of  Oliver,  the  elder  brother  of  Or- 
lando, is  not  logical,  or  at  least  it  is  not  so  presented  as 
to  make  us  believe  in  its  strict  relation  to  their  char- 
acteristics. The  Duke  and  Oliver  fulfil  their  purpose, 
when  their  ill-founded  jealousies  bring  about  the 
union  of  Rosalind  and  Orlando  in  the  Forest  of  Arden. 
And  their  sudden  and  absurd  repentance  at  the  end  of 
the  play,  their  reformation  in  the  twinkling  of  an  eye, 
does  not  vex  us  because  we  really  do  not  care  what  they 
may  do  or  how  completely  they  may  contradict  them- 
selves. So  also  in  "Much  Ado  about  Nothing,"  the 
malignant  machinations  of  Don  John , and  Borachio 
are  almost  motiveless, —  at  least  their  willing  wicked- 
ness is  taken  for  granted  by  the  playwright  and  ac- 
cepted by  the  playgoers.  The  cause  of  their  villainous 
intrigue  against  the  gentle  Hero  is  suggested  summa- 
rily, with  no  serious  effort  to  buttress  it  into  plausi- 
bility. We  can  discover  this  weakness,  if  we  care  to 
look  curiously  at  the  construction  of  the  plot ;  but  this 
is  just  what  we  are  not  tempted  to  inquire  into.  We 
are  so  busy  following  the  wit-battle  of  Benedick  and 
Beatrice  that  we  have  no  leisure  to  peer  into  the  mo- 
tives which  move  two  minor  but  necessary  persons  to 
bring  about  the  startling  climax  of  the  comedy. 

On  the  other  hand,  if  the  character  who  acts  arbi- 
trarily is  in  the  thick  of  the  story  and  holds  the  center 
of  the  stage,  then  with  all  our  good  will  we  cannot  help 
noticing  what  he  is  doing,  and  it  irritates  us  to  be  forced 
to  observe  his  inadequately  motived  actions.  Neces- 
sarily our  interest  flags,  when  we  hear  the  machinery 


204  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

creak  a  little  too  loudly.  In  the  "Winter's  Tale,"  for 
instance,  the  swift  jealousy  and  violent  rage  of  Leontes 
seems  to  us  in  the  twentieth  century  merely  wilful,  and 
almost  without  justification.  It  is  quite  possible  that 
this  unexpected  transformation  of  character  was  pleas- 
ing to  the  Elizabethan  audiences,  for  whom  the  play 
was  originally  prepared  and  who  relished  surprises  of 
all  kinds,  even  if  these  contradicted  the  strict  logic  of 
the  character.  But  nowadays  we  like  tb  see  every 
character  obeying  its  own  logic  ;  and  when  it  renounces 
this  continuity,  we  are  vexed  that  the  author  had  not 
taken  more  pains  to  attain  plausibility.  So  in  the 
"  Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona,"  a  chief  personage  of  the 
piece,  Proteus,  is  shown  to  us  as  a  perfect  gentleman 
at  one  moment,  and  at  the  next  as  an  unspeakable 
cad;  and  the  plot  turns  on  this  unexplained  and  in- 
explicable change  in  him.  And  in  this  arbitrariness  of 
Proteus  and  of  Leontes,  set  in  the  forefront  of  these 
dramas,  we  may  find  one  reason  why  the  "Winter's 
Tale"  and  the  "Two  Gentlemen  of  Verona"  are  not  so 
popular  in  the  theater  to-day  as  are  "As  You  Like  It" 
and  "  Much  Ado  about  Nothing,"  in  both  of  which  the 

arbitrary  characters  are  subordinate  and  unimportant. 

« 

VI 

These  illustrations  have  been  taken  from  Shakspere, 
but  they  might  have  been  chosen  from  almost  any 
modern  playwright.  Sardou,  for  example,  never  wrote 
a  more  ambitious  drama  than  his  "  Patrie,"  a  historical 
play  having  for  its  background  the  manly  resistance 
of  the  Netherlands  to  Spain.  The  piece  abounds  in 
pathetic  situations  and  in  adroit  inventions;  but  it 
has  always  proved  disappointing  in  the  theater,  be- 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         205 

cause  the  heroine,  whose  shoulders  bear  the  burden 
of  the  plot,  acts  more  than  once  not  as  she  would  have 
acted,  but  as  the  author  forced  her  to  act  so  that  the 
play  may  be  what  he  had  plotted.  The  ordinary  spec- 
tator may  not  be  able  to  give  this  as  the  reason  why  he 
has  not  enjoyed  the  performance,  but  he  feels  dumbly 
that  something  is  wrong. 

A  central  character  who  acts  arbitrarily  before  the 
eyes  of  the  spectators,  so  that  they  are  forced  to  wit- 
ness his  self-contradiction,  is  certain  to  alienate  the  sym- 
pathy of  the  audience  and  to  imperil  the  success  of 
the  play,  unless  this  central  character  happens  to  be 
either  of  two  distinct  things.  He  may  be  enigmatic,  and 
then  the  spectators  will  tolerate  what  they  do  not 
clearly  understand ;  or  else  he  must  be  openly  the  vil- 
lain of  the  play,  and  then  they  are  ready  enough  to 
accept  any  dark  scheme,  however  obscure  its  motive. 

Hamlet  is  the  best  possible  example  of  the  char- 
acter who  is  both  arbitrary  and  enigmatic ;  but  Hedda 
Gabler  is  almost  as  significant.  Hamlet  is  subtle  and 
moody  and  changeable;  and  we  never  know  what 
he  will  do  next.  Hedda  is  queer  and  abnormal  and 
freakish ;  and  we  accept  her  for  what  she  seems  to  be 
at  the  moment,  tolerating  in  her  many  things  which 
would  be  intolerable  in  another  woman.  It  is  only 
when  we  study  this  play  of  Ibsen's  in  the  library  and 
endeavor  to  dissect  its  mechanism,  that  we  perceive 
that  more  than  one  of  the  heroine's  actions,  which 
appeared  sufficiently  spontaneous  in  the  theater,  was 
really  the  result  of  the  adroit  author's  desire  to  bring 
about  the  fatal  termination  he  had  resolved  on. 

lago  is  the  best  possible  example  of  a  very  important 
character  who  acts  arbitrarily  without  interfering  with 


206  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

our  interest  in  the  play.  lago's  hatred  of  Othello  is  the 
mainspring  of  the  plot ;  and  this  Shakspere  calmly  takes 
for  granted.  It  is  true  that  the  author  feels  the  need 
of  explaining  it,  and  of  justifying  it.  He  gives  three  or 
four  different  reasons  for  it;  but  none  are  convincing. 
Indeed,  one  of  them  is  almost  absurd,  —  lago's  jeal- 
ousy of  Othello  because  he  suspects  his  chief  of  an  in- 
trigue with  Emilia.  All  of  them  taken  together  fail 
to  account  adequately  for  the  fiendish  malignity  of 
lago's  revenge.  But  we  are  not  moved  to  protest,  since 
we  see  in  lago  a  figure  of  incarnate  evil,  capable  of  any 
wickedness  and  working  destruction  without  restraint 
and  almost  without  cause,  simply  because  of  his  black- 
ness of  soul.  From  a  creature  morally  so  hideous 
nothing  astonishes  us. 

But  it  is  only  a  villain  or  an  enigmatic  character 
whom  we  are  willing  to  pardon  for  acting  arbitrarily. 
The  hero  and  the  heroine  of  a  play  must  conform  to 
our  idea  of  the  natural.  They  must  act  as  we  think  they 
would  act  in  real  life,  or  else  they  lose  our  sympathy. 
If  the  hero  and  the  heroine  continually  do  before  our 
eyes  what  seems  to  us  unreasonable,  our  interest  in  their 
story  slackens  and  is  soon  dispersed.  This  is  a  chief 
reason  why  Browning's  "Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon," 
powerful  as  it  is,  has  never  been  able  to  establish  it- 
self in  the  theater.  Nor  is  Browning  the  only  poet 
who  has  fallen  into  this  error.  The  plays  of  Beaumont 
and  Fletcher,  for  example,  abound  in  scenes  of  infi- 
nite pathos  and  of  striking  theatrical  effectiveness ;  but 
these  authors  were  careless  of  probability  and  reckless 
in  the  conjunction  of  incoherent  episodes.  In  any  one 
of  their  pieces,  any  character  may  do  anything  at  any 
moment  wholly  regardless  of  consistency. 


THE  LOGIC   OF  CONSTRUCTION         207 

This  liking  for  the  unusual  and  for  the  violent  is  not 
uncommon  among  the  tragic  dramatists,  many  of  whom 
seem  to  have  felt  that  ordinary  life  is  so  commonplace 
that  nothing  is  really  dramatic  unless  it  is  strange  and 
unheard  of.  Corneille,  for  example,  deliberately  sought 
for  the  most  unlikely  combinations,  and  searched  his- 
tory to  find  them,  not  unsuccessfully,  since  fact  is  often 
stranger  than  fiction.  Again,  Schiller  allowed  Karl  Moor, 
in  the  "  Robbers,"  to  believe  the  worst  on  a  mere  hint 
from  his  villainous  brother,  although  the  hero  is  well 
aware  that  no  dependence  ought  to  be  placed  on  any- 
thing from  such  a  source ;  and  yet  such  is  the  sweeping 
force  of  Schiller's  story  as  it  surges  swiftly  along  that 
the  spectators  have  scarcely  time  to  notice  this  incon- 
sistency. Victor  Hugo  also  constantly  made  use  of 
very  improbable  coincidences.  In  his  "Ruy  Bias," 
almost  every  character  is  more  or  less  arbitrary,  and 
hardly  a  single  incident  occurs  except  by  the  more  or 
less  obvious  intervention  of  the  author;  and  yet  such 
is  the  charm  of  the  resonant  verse  with  which  these 
prearranged  happenings  are  presented,  that  the  play 
still  pleases  in  spite  of  its  inherent  artificiality. 

Ibsen,  on  the  other  hand,  sought  to  express  the  inner 
significance  of  the  commonplace  and  to  disclose  the 
tragedy  which  may  lie  latent  in  the  humdrum.  The 
arbitrariness  of  incident  and  the  frequency  of  coinci- 
dence, which  are  raised  to  the  maximum  in  Hugo's  ro- 
manticist pieces,  are  reduced  to  the  minimum  in  Ibsen's 
realistic  social-dramas.  But  even  Ibsen  is  sometimes 
a  little  disconcerting;  and  the  startling  transformation 
of  Nora  in  the  final  act  of  the  "Doll's  House"  has 
seemed  to  some  critics,  if  not  actually  in  contradiction 
to  her  character,  at  least  not  satisfactorily  prepared  for. 


208  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

Perhaps  also  the  confession  and  self-abasement  of 
Consul  Bernick,  in  the  "  Pillars  of  Society,"  is  not  what 
the  author  had  led  us  to  expect  from  a  character  so 
self-seeking  and  so  smugly  self-complacent.  In  both 
of  these  plays  of  Ibsen's,  however,  this  element  of  the 
arbitrary  is  to  be  found  only  in  the  last  act,  after  our 
interest  has  been  aroused  and  sustained  by  the  veracity 
of  all  that  has  gone  before. 

If  an  author  cannot  work  out  his  plot  absolutely 
without  the  intervention  of  the  arbitrary,  then  he  will 
do  well  to  follow  Aristotle's  advice  and  keep  it  out  of 
that  part  of  the  story  which  he  is  going  to  present,  and 
to  throw  it  back  before  the  beginning  of  the  play.  This 
is  what  Sir  Arthur  Pinero  did  in  "  His  House  in  Order," 
which  turns  on  the  discover}7  by  a  downtrodden  second 
wife  that  her  predecessor  had  been  unfaithful.  Here 
the  arbitrary  character  is  the  first  wife ;  and  she  is  dead 
long  before  the  play  begins.  This  again  is  what  Sopho- 
cles did  two  thousand  years  earlier  in  "(Edipus  the 
King."  An  oracle  had  predicted  that  (Edipus  would 
kill  his  father  and  marry  his  mother;  and  when  the 
play  opens,  the  prediction  has  been  fulfilled.  If  (Edi- 
pus had  ever  inquired  into  the  circumstances  of  the 
death  of  locasta's  first  husband,  he  would  have  been 
able  to  avoid  the  predicted  incest.  But  if  he  had  made 
this  inquiry,  we  could  not  have  had  the  play.  As  we 
look  back  over  the  whole  story,  we  cannot  help  per- 
ceiving the  overwhelming  improbability  that  after  the 
warning  of  the  oracle,  locasta  should  ever  have  dared 
to  marry  a  man  young  enough  to  be  her  son.  The 
Greek  poet  was  not  bound  to  supply  any  explanation 
for  this  inexplicable  procedure  of  hers,  because  he  was 
only  dramatizing  a  legend  long  familiar  to  the  immense 


THE  LOGIC  OF  CONSTRUCTION         209 

majority  of  the  Athenian  audience.  The  improbability 
being  in  the  legend,  it  had  to  be  in  the  drama  dealing 
with  the  legend ;  and  Sophocles  very  wisely  wasted  no 
time  in  any  effort  to  explain  it  away.  Here  he  was 
shrewder  than  the  modern  poets  who  have  handled 
the  same  myth,  and  who  fatigued  themselves  in  a  vain 
attempt  to  make  the  improbable  a  little  less  improbable, 
with  the  sole  result  of  forcing  the  spectators  to  notice 
something  they  might  otherwise  have  taken  for  granted. 
These  two  arbitrary  situations,  the  failure  of  (Edipus 
to  pursue  the  slayer  of  Laius,  and  the  marriage  of  lo- 
casta  with  a  man  many  years  her  junior,  —  this  is  the 
foundation  of  the  story.  The  two  things  may  be  im- 
possible to  accept,  but  if  we  refuse  to  accept  them,  then 
we  reject  the  play  which  is  based  on  them.  It  was  an 
interesting  discovery  of  Sarcey's  that  an  audience  is 
never  unduly  exacting  about  the  assumption  on  which 
a  play  is  founded.  It  will  listen  to  the  exposition  of  a 
most  unlikely  state  of  affairs ;  it  will  give  its  attention 
to  the  author  while  he  sets  forth  the  existence  of  two 
pairs  of  twins  so  alike  that  their  own  wives  cannot 
tell  them  apart  (as  in  the  "Comedy  of  Errors");  or 
while  he  explains  that  a  wandering  Englishman  is 
the  very  image  of  the  sovereign  on  the  throne  (as  in 
the  "Prisoner  of  Zenda").  It  will  sit  back  calmly  and 
wait  to  see  what  will  happen  next,  giving  the  author 
all  the  rope  he  asks  for,  but  whether  to  hang  himself 
or  to  pull  himself  on  deck  is  as  the  event  turns  out. 
If  the  play  which  the  author  builds  on  an  arbitrary 
supposition  of  this  sort  catches  the  interest  of  the  spec- 
tators and  holds  them  enthralled  as  the  story  unrolls 
itself,  then  they  forget  all  about  its  artificial  basis  and 
they  have  no  leisure  to  cavil.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  the 


210  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

play  is  dull  and  fatiguing  to  witness,  their  attention 
strays  away  from  it  and  they  have  time  to  go  back 
to  its  arbitrary  foundation.  And  then  they  rise  up  in 
their  wrath  and  denounce  the  foolishness  of  the  author 
who  dared  to  suppose  that  they  could  ever  be  interested 
in  anything  built  upon  an  absurdity  so  flagrant. 


CHAPTER  X 

THE  ANALYSIS   OF  A  PLAY 

Back  of  every  art  product  there  is  a  conception,  vaguely  or 
definitely  present  in  the  artist's  mind.  Upon  the  character  of  this 
conception  or  content  depends  the  significance  of  the  work  of  art; 
its  formal  beauty  depends  upon  the  artist's  skill  to  express  his  thought 
or  feeling  in  the  particular  medium  he  has  chosen.  Content  and  form 
are  therefore  most  intimately  related  in  the  artist's  personality.  He 
can  express  nothing  through  the  concrete  medium  of  his  particular 
art  —  whether  it  be  a  pigment  or  clay  or  a  harmony  of  musical 
sounds  or  a  succession  of  words  —  unless  it  has  first  passed  through 
the  lens  of  his  own  nature.  It  is  always  difficult,  and  in  a  certain  sense 
unnatural,  to  make  a  sharp  separation  between  the  elements  of  con- 
tent and  form.  The  artist  himself  rarely  attempts  it.  He  "  thinks 
in  color  "  or  feels  in  terms  of  musical  sound.  The  finer  the  work  of 
art,  the  more  indissolubly  are  the  elements  fused  through  the  per- 
sonality of  the  artist.  And  yet  it  is  often  of  the  greatest  value  to  the 
student  to  attempt  this  separate  analysis,  —  to  distinguish  what 
has  gone  into  the  work  of  art  from  the  external  form  in  which  it  is 
clothed.  —  BLISS  PERRY,  A.  Study  of  Prose  Fiction. 


WHEN  we  have  witnessed  the  performance  of  a  play 
in  the  theater,  or  when  we  have  read  it  in  the  library, 
making  the  imaginative  effort  needful  to  visualize  its 
action,  we  find  ourselves  either  liking  it  or  disliking  it. 
We  have  an  opinion  as  to  its  merits  and  its  demerits ; 
but  we  may  not  be  able  to  formulate  this  opinion  to 
our  satisfaction  or  to  bring  forward  the  several  reasons 
which  have  led  us  to  it.  We  may  wish  to  analyze  the 
emotions  we  have  experienced  and  to  find  justification 
for  the  faith  that  is  in  us.  If  the  play  pleased  us,  we 


212  A  STUDY  OF   THE  DRAMA 

want  to  know  why  it  pleased  us.  We  may  even  go  fur- 
ther and  desire  also  to  know  whether  our  pleasure  was 
legitimate  or  not.  What  was  the  source  of  it  ?  Is  the 
play  really  as  good  as  it  seemed  to  us  ?  We  may  have 
felt  that  here  was  a  drama  that  we  ought  to  like,  and 
yet  that  it  did  not  interest  us ;  and  in  that  case,  was  the 
fault  in  the  play  or  in  us  ?  On  the  other  hand,  we  may 
have  enjoyed  it,  having  all  the  while  a  sneaking  suspi- 
cion that  it  was  not  really  worthy  of  our  approval.  In 
short,  what  are  the  proper  tests  to  apply  that  we  may 
each  of  us  be  assured  of  our  own  judgment  ? 

The  beginning  of  wisdom  is  honesty  with  ourselves. 
Our  own  impressions  must  always  be  the  basis  of  our 
opinions,  or  we  are  certain  to  be  insincere  and  to  weaken 
our  grasp  on  reality.  First  of  all,  did  this  play  in- 
terest us  ?  If  so,  why  ?  If  it  did  not,  why  did  it  not  ? 
Interest  is  something  that  can  easily  be  gaged.  If  the 
play  was  actually  seen  in  the  theater,  when  did  our 
attention  begin  to  flag  ?  If  it  was  only  read  in  the  li- 
brary, when  did  we  fail  to  visualize  the  action  and 
begin  to  skip  as  though  in  haste  to  be  done  with  it  ?  Just 
here,  use  can  be  made  of  a  device  which  may  seem  a 
little  pedantic  at  first  sight,  but  which  is  in  fact  practi- 
cal and. helpful.  We  can  make  a  diagram  of  the  inter- 
est aroused  in  us  as  the  play  progressed,  drawing  a 
single  line  which  shall  rise  with  our  increased  attention, 
which  shall  run  on  a  level  when  our  attention  slackens, 
and  which  shall  droop  when  we  admit  ourselves  to  be 
bored. 

This  diagram  of  interest  will  mark  and  measure  the 
path  we  have  traveled.  It  is  a  visible  record  of  our  im- 
pressions, and  it  gives  us  a  tangible  foundation  for  fur- 
ther inquiry.  It  is  wholly  distinct  from  the  artificial 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  213 

pyramid  which  Freytag  exploited  in  his  "  Technic  of  the 
Drama";  and  it  has  no  relation  to  the  needlessly  com- 
plicated figures  which  have  been  devised  to  elucidate 
(or  to  obscure)  Shakspere's  plot-making.  It  is  simplicity 
itself,  and  yet  it  serves  to  bring  before  us  graphically  the 
immediate  effect  of  the  play  upon  ourselves. 

As  the  dramatist  has  carefully  to  attend  to  his  expo- 
sition in  the  first  act,  to  introduce  his  several  characters, 
to  inform  us  as  to  their  past  lives  and  as  to  their  present 
desires,  and,  in  a  word,  to  get  his  machinery  started,  we 
need  not  be  surprised  if  the  line  of  interest  is  almost 
level  in  the  earlier  scenes.  But  it  ought  to  begin  to  rise 
before  the  end  of  the  first  act.  And  it  ought  not  to  droop 
again  until  toward  the  end  of  the  last  act,  flattening  a 
little  perhaps  when  the  spectators  are  at  last  able  to 
foresee  just  how  the  story  is  going  to  turn  out.  In  a  well- 
made  modern  play  in  three  acts,  the  line  of  interest, 
broken  into  three  pieces,  is  not  likely  to  vary  greatly 
from  this :  — 


DIAGRAM  A. 

This  diagram  would  represent  exactly  the  increasing 
interest  the  average  spectator  would  take  in  such  a  play, 
if  he  had  kept  his  finger  on  his  pulse,  so  to  speak.  A 
similar  but  unbroken  line  would  serve  to  indicate  the 
interest  taken  by  the  audience  at  the  performance  of  a 
great  Greek  tragedy,  except  that  it  would  rise  more 
sharply  and  that  it  might  fall  off  more  emphatically 


S14  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

toward  the  end,  since  the  delicate  artistic  perception  of 
the  Greeks  led  them  to  relax  the  tension  after  the  cul- 
minating moment.  Here  is  the  diagram  of  interest  of 
the  "(Edipus  the  King"  of  Sophocles:  — 


DIAGRAM  B. 

"Whether  it  can  be  artistic,"  so  Professor  Bradley  has 
declared,  "to  end  any  serious  scene  whatever  at  the  point 
of  greatest  tension  seems  doubtful,  but  surely  it  is  little  short 
of  barbarous  to  drop  the  curtain  on  the  last  dying  words, 
or,  it  may  be,  the  last  convulsion,  of  a  tragic  hero.  In  tragedy, 
the  Elizabethan  practice,  like  the  Greek,  was  to  lower  the 
pitch  of  emotion  from  this  point  by  a  few  quiet  words  .  .  . 
and  so  to  restore  the  audience  to  common  life,  'in  calm  of 
mind,  all  passion  spent.'" 

There  is  a  modern  play,  akin  to  this  masterpiece  of 
the  Greek  drama,  in  its  somber  gloom  and  in  its  inex- 
orable inevitability.  This  is  Ibsen's  "  Ghosts" ;  but  the 
Scandinavian  playwright  refused  to  relax  the  tension 
at  the  end.  He  even  prolonged  it  beyond  the  limits  of 
the  play,  leaving  us  wondering  what  happened  after  the 
final  curtain  fell.  So  we  may  represent  its  line  of  inter- 
est thus :  — 


DIAGRAM  C. 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  215 

In  "Hamlet,"  the  interest  is  constantly  ascending 
from  the  very  beginning,  that  admirably  effective  open- 
ing scene  on  the  battlements  of  Elsinore,  which  carries 
us  at  once  into  an  atmosphere  of  impending  doom ;  but 
it  wavers  a  little  in  the  fourth  act  and  it  flattens  off  al- 
most in  the  Greek  fashion  after  the  death  of  Hamlet 
himself.  This  then  would  be  the  diagram :  — 


DIAGRAM   D. 

In  "Othello,"  the  exposition  is  also  swift  and  grip- 
ping ;  and  the  attention  is  held  all  through  the  first  act. 
But  in  the  second  act,  the  story  shifts  to  Cyprus ;  and 
several  scenes  elapse  before  the  dramatist  can  key  up 
the  action  to  the  same  pitch  of  intensity.  When  he  does 
achieve  this  at  last,  he  is  able  to  intensify  our  interest 
by  every  succeeding  episode  almost  to  the  final  word. 
And  this  is  made  clear  in  the  diagram :  — 


DIAGRAM   E. 


Victor  Hugo,  in  two  of  his  plays,  "Hernani"  and 
"Ruy  Bias,"  was  so  far  negligent  of  cumulative  effect 


216  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

that  his  fourth  acts  were  filled  with  matter  not  closely 
knit  into  the  central  theme.  And  it  is  therefore  not  un- 
fair to  disclose  this  defect  in  the  diagram  of  "  Hernani, " 
thus :  — 


DIAGRAM   F. 

and  in  that  of  "Ruy  Bias,"  thus:  — 


DIAGRAM  G. 

This  diagram  makes  clear  the  reason  why  the  English 
adaptation,  acted  by  Fechter  and  Edwin  Booth,  was 
in  four  acts  only,  —  the  uninteresting  act  being  boldly 
omitted. 

In  the  "Weavers"  of  Hauptmann,  one  of  the  most 
striking  of  social-dramas,  there  is  unity  of  impression 
but  no  concentration  of  story.  The  several  acts  have 
each  of  them  an  interest  of  their  own ;  but,  as  a  whole, 
the  plot  is  not  coherent  or  cumulative.  And  this  is  dis- 
closed at  once  in  the  diagram :  — 


DIAGRAM   H. 

Now  and  again  we  happen  upon  a  play  which  is 
frankly  disappointing  and  which  is  quite  unable  to  hold 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  217 

our  interest  whether  on  the  stage  or  in  the  study.  And 
then  we  might  be  forced  to  a  discouraging  diagram  like 
this:  — 


DIAGRAM   I. 

or  even  to  another,  still  more  condemnatory :  — 


DIAGRAM  J. 

This  translation  into  a  diagram  of  our  fluctuating 
interest  in  a  play  is  a  test  primarily  only  of  the  skill  of 
the  playmaker.  It  is  a  test  of  the  form  of  the  piece  and 
not  of  its  content ;  for  every  work  of  art  is  to  be  judged 
by  its  form  as  well  as  by  its  content.  The  great  plays 
are  great  only  because  a  worthy  content  is  presented 
in  a  worthy  form.  The  dramatist  must  do  his  best  to 
arouse  and  to  hold  the  interest  of  the  spectators  before 
whom  his  play  is  performed.  And  the  merit  of  any  mes- 
sage he  may  have  to  deliver  does  not  excuse  him  for  any 
failure  to  master  the  technic  of  the  dramaturgic  art.  If 
he  prefers  to  express  himself  dramatically,  then  he  must 
abide  by  the  decision  of  the  theater.  From  that  there  is 
for  him  no  appeal,  since  an  audience  of  his  own  con- 
temporarie^  is  the  tribunal  he  has  himself  chosen.  He 
may  have  a  message  of  high  importance,  he  may  have 
his  own  vision  of  human  life,  he  may  have  his  own  phi- 
losophy ;  but  these  things  he  can  present  in  a  play  only 
after  he  has  acquired  the  craft  of  the  playwright.  And 
the  value  of  his  subject-matter  will  not  excuse  him  for 


218  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

i 

any  technical  deficiencies.  He  must  master  the  methods 
of  the  stage  of  his  own  time,  adjusting  his  story  to  the 
actor  and  to  the  theater,  and  keeping  in  mind  always  the 
opinions  and  the  prejudices  of  the  audience  for  whose 
pleasure  he  is  working. 

ii 

The  dominant  peculiarity  of  a  body  of  spectators 
assembled  in  a  theater  is  their  unwillingness  to  be  inter- 
ested unless  they  have  presented  to  them  a  story  which 
discloses  an  essential  struggle,  an  assertion  of  human 
volition,  a  clash  of  contending  desires.  This  essential 
struggle,  whether  comic  or  tragic,  must  be  the  core  of 
the  play ;  it  must  be  sharply  visible ;  or  else  the  attention 
of  the  audience  will  wander.  If  we  are  moved  by  any 
performance  to  make  diagram  I  or  diagram  J,  we  shall 
probably  find  that  the  play  thus  disparaged  lacked  an 
essential  struggle,  that  the  characters  did  not  know 
their  own  minds,  and  that  things  seemed  merely  to  hap- 
pen and  not  to  be  brought  about  by  the  logic  of  char- 
acter and  circumstance.  If  we  find  ourselves  led  to 
make  diagram  H,  we  may  be  assured  that  the  play 
had  no  dominating  figure,  and  that  the  struggle  was 
fragmentary  and  not  concentrated  and  coordinated. 
If  we  consider  carefully  the  plays  for  which  diagrams 
E,  F,  and  G  were  made,  we  can  easily  discover  that  the 
level  or  dropping  lines  were  due  to  a  straying  away 
from  the  essential  struggle,  to  a  momentary  wandering 
into  a  by-path,  after  the  dramatist  had  indicated  to  us 
the  main  road  along  which  he  promised  to  travel. 

Yet  diagrams  not  unlike  E  and  F  and  G  would  have 
to  be  made  for  the  plays  of  many  of  the  Elizabethan 
dramatists,  especially  for  certain  of  those  credited  to 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  219 

Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  —  because  these  authors  were 
able  to  obtain  their  startlingly  effective  situations  only 
by  an  arbitrary  change  in  one  or  more  of  their  charac- 
ters. It  is  disconcerting  to  us  nowadays  —  whatever  it 
may  have  been  to  Elizabethan  playgoers  —  to  see  an 
important  character  do  or  say  something  which  we  feel 
he  never  would  have  done  or  said.  We  cannot  help 
applying  the  standard  of  common  sense,  of  normal 
human  conduct.  And  when  a  character  fails  to  attain 
this  standard,  when  we  see  him  doing  something  which 
he  would  not  naturally  do,  something  which  is  in  con- 
tradiction with  all  we  know  about  his  motives,  then  we 
have  our  attention  violently  distracted.  We  are  forced 
for  the  moment  to  consider  this  deed ;  and  thus  we  lose 
contact  with  the  play  as  it  is  going  on  before  us. 

Our  interest  may  fall  for  yet  another  reason  not  quite 
so  simple  to  grasp.  The  author  may  have  avoided  the 
arbitrary  and  he  may  have  stuck  to  his  main  story,  but 
without  presenting  in  action  all  the  special  scenes  which 
he  had  led  us  to  expect,  the  scenes  a  faire,  as  Sarcey 
called  them.  If  he  has  suppressed  these  or  shirked 
them,  then  we  find  ourselves  disconcerted,  as  though 
deprived  of  a  promised  pleasure.  We  do  not  always 
know  exactly  what  it  is  that  we  have  been  defrauded 
of,  but  we  are  vaguely  conscious  that  all  is  not  as  it 
should  be.  Thus  our  attention  is  again  distracted,  al- 
though it  is  only  by  taking  thought  that  we  can  discover 
the  special  scene  which  we  had  hoped  for  and  did  not 
get.  Here  a  diagram  reveals  its  utility.  It  tells  us  just 
where  it  was  that  the  interest  fell  off  and  it  points  out 
the  precise  spot  where  we  must  seek  the  explanation. 
A  supreme  test  of  dramaturgic  instinct  lies  in  the  choice 
of  those  parts  of  the  plot  which  shall  be  shown  in  action 


220  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

and  those  which  shall  be  merely  narrated.  Goethe  re- 
vealed his  deficiency  in  the  native  gift  of  playmaking  in 
his  version  of  "Romeo  and  Juliet,"  wherein  he  omitted 
the  actual  quarrel  between  the  Montagues  and  the  Cap- 
ulets  and  contented  himself  with  telling  about  it  instead 
of  putting  it  visibly  before  the  spectators. 

Another  cause  of  relaxing  interest  is  the  use  of  out- 
worn traditions,  of  temporary  conventions  no  longer 
acceptable  to  us,  even  if  they  were  satisfactory  enough 
to  an  earlier  generation  of  playgoers.  The  permanent 
conventions  we  are  glad  to  allow  always,  since  by  deny- 
ing them  we  should  be  depriving  ourselves.  But  there 
are  temporary  conventions,  which  correspond  to  tempo- 
rary theatrical  conditions  and  which  begin  to  strike  us 
as  absurd  as  soon  as  these  theatrical  conditions  have 
changed.  For  example,  a  device,  now  so  outworn  that 
it  is  likely  to  raise  a  smile  and  thus  to  break  the  cur- 
rent of  sympathy,  is  eavesdropping.  When  we  see  a 
gentleman  concealing  himself  deliberately  behind  a 
curtain,  to  overhear  the  conversation  of  two  ladies, 
we  feel  that  this  is  an  act  of  which  he  ought  not  to  be 
guilty.  He  loses  our  regard  and  the  play  suffers  immedi- 
ately. It  was  the  duty  of  the  dramatist  to  invent  some 
less  obvious  method  of  putting  this  gentleman  in  posses- 
sion of  the  information  thus  improperly  obtained.  The 
audience  is  ever  applying  the  standard  of  good  man- 
ners as  well  as  the  standard  of  common  sense. 

in 

Another  source  of  distracted  attention  is  to  be  sought 
in  the  uneasiness  which  spectators  sometimes  feel 
when  they  find  that  the  play  they  are  witnessing  does 
not  belong  to  the  type  which  they  had  been  led  to 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  221 

expect.  A  good  farce  affords  amusement  to  many; 
and  farce  itself  is  a  perfectly  legitimate  type.  But  when 
we  are  invited  to  a  comedy-of -manners,  or  when  a  play 
begins  as  though  it  was  a  comedy-of-manners,  and  then 
degenerates  into  farce  and  turns  out  to  be  quite  different 
from  what  it  had  at  first  declared  itself  to  be,  then  we 
are  likely  to  be  disconcerted.  Naturally,  we  are  tempted 
to  apply  to  this  farce  the  standards  proper  enough  to 
the  comedy-of-manners  and  not  to  those  of  the  farce  it- 
self;  and  the  result  is  unsatisfactory.  Sooner  or  later, 
we  may  make  a  mental  readjustment,  and  take  the 
farce  for  what  it  is  and  not  for  what  we  had  supposed 
it  to  be;  but  in  the  meanwhile,  we  have  felt  a  certain 
confusion. 

So  it  is  that  when  we  go  to  see  a  poetic  play,  a  tragedy, 
whether  in  prose  or  verse,  we  apply  the  standards 
proper  to  tragedy,  and  we  expect  to  be  thrilled  by  the 
deeds  of  men  and  women  governed  by  the  stern  logic 
of  their  own  characters.  The  sadness  of  tragedy  is 
due  to  the  pity  of  it,  to  our  feeling  that  it  had  to  be 
what  it  is,  and  that  the  catastrophe  was  all  foredoomed 
by  fate.  Our  pleasure  may  be  austere,  but  it  is  noble, 
and  it  depends  upon  the  artistic  honesty  of  the  poet. 
It  is  his  duty  to  make  us  sympathize  with  the  characters 
who  are  battling  with  destiny,  who  are  doing  their  best, 
and  who  are  waging  a  losing  fight.  And  we  are  swift 
to  perceive  and  to  resent  any  arbitrary  intervention  of 
the  author,  whereby  his  tragic  figures  lose  their  large 
humanity  and  sink  into  mere  puppets  pulled  here  and 
there  by  the  visible  hand  of  the  playwright. 

Here  we  find  an  explanation  for  the  doubt  which 
often  obsesses  us  after  we  have  witnessed  the  perform- 
ance of  a  poetic  play.  We  recognize  the  poetry;  we 


222  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

cannot  deny  the  fine  quality  of  the  writing;  and  yet  we 
wonder  why  it  is  that  the  play  has  left  us  cold.  Our 
modesty  may  even  make  us  believe  that  the  fault  is  in 
us  and  that  we  ourselves  may  be  incapable  of  appre- 
ciating a  work  of  art  at  once  delicate  and  noble.  We 
know  what  we  like,  after  all,  and  we  are  aware  that  this 
drama  did  not  give  us  the  pleasure  proper  to  the  theater. 
Of  course,  the  fault  may  be  in  us;  but  in  the  case  of 
Browning's  "Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon,"  for  example,  the 
fault  is  in  the  author.  If  we  have  failed  to  enjoy  his 
play,  the  blame  must  lie  at  his  door,  because  he  has 
not  been  able  to  sustain  his  tragedy  on  the  lofty  tragic 
level.  The  discredit  for  the  failure  of  a  play  of  high 
aspiration  is  very  rarely  to  be  borne  by  the  audiences. 
It  must  be  assumed,  more  often  than  not,  by  the  dra- 
matist himself,  because  he  has  not  really  given  us  what 
he  thought  he  was  giving  us. 

As  the  French  painter  put  it  pithily  to  his  American 
colleague :  "  True  art  is  a  method  of  expression,  done 
by  a  man  who  has  something  to  say  in  poetry  or  prose, 
paint  or  clay."  It  is  not  sufficient  that  he  have  some- 
thing to  say;  he  must  also  master  the  method  of  ex- 
pregsion  which  he  has  chosen.  He  must  say  what  he 
has  to  say  in  such  fashion  that  we  cannot  choose  but 
hear.  He  must  deliver  his  message  so  appealingly  that 
we  are  glad  to  listen  to  it,  even  if  we  may  be  unwilling 
to  accept  it.  He  must  remember  always  that  the  con- 
tent of  his  work  will  avail  him  little  or  nothing  if  the 
form  of  it  is  not  also  satisfying  to  the  main  body  of  his 
contemporaries. 

IV 

Closely  akin  to  this  necessary  veracity  of  character- 
delineation  is  the  larger  truth  of  the  play  as  a  whole. 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  223 

Is  this  portrayal  of  our  common  humanity  in  accord, 
not  only  with  the  logic  of  the  several  characters  intro- 
duced, but  also  with  the  manners  and  customs  of  the 
time?  Is  it  true  to  life  as  we  all  know  life?  We  are 
disappointed  if  we  fail  to  find  the  accent  of  verity  in 
what  purports  to  be  a  picture  of  existence  as  it  is.  If 
this  accent  of  verity  is  lacking  in  a  serious  drama  or 
in  a  high-comedy,  the  principle  of  Economy  of  Atten- 
tion is  violated  at  once."  We  cease  following  the  story 
on  the  stage  while  we  look  at  each  other  with  dumb 
inquiry.  We  find  ourselves  asking  who  these  strange 
creatures  are  that  behave  in  this  curious  fashion,  re- 
fusing to  play  the  game  of  human  intercourse  accord- 
ing to  the  established  rules. 

Mr.  Henry  James  once  suggested  as  a  test  of  the  rank 
of  a  novel  that  we  ask  ourselves  whether  it  aroused  in 
us  the  emotions  of  surprise  or  the  emotions  of  recog- 
nition. If  it  amuses  us  only  by  the  ingenuity  of  its  story 
and  by  the  startling  effect  of  its  unexpected  incidents, 
it  stands  on  a  lower  plane  than  if  it  please  us  by  reveal- 
ing unsuspected  recesses  of  the  human  soul,  which  we 
accept  as  veracious  although  we  had  never  before  per- 
ceived them.  The  same  test  is  as  valid  in  the  theater 
as  in  the  library ;  and  in  a  serious  drama,  as  well  as  in  a 
high-comedy,  mere  surprise  must  always  be  subordinate 
to  the  subtler  recognition.  We  expect  the  dramatist 
to  explain  us  to  ourselves  and  to  turn  his  lantern  on  the 
hidden  corners  of  character,  whether  tragic  or  comic. 
When  we  see  a  personage  in  a  play  do  this,  or  when  we 
hear  him  say  that,  we  ought  to  feel  instantly  that  how- 
ever unforeseen  the  deed  or  the  saying  may  be,  it  was 
precisely  what  that  personage  would  have  done  or  said 
at  that  particular  moment  of  his  life. 


224  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

Of  course,  we  are  not  justified  in  applying  this  test 
to  the  humbler  forms  of  the  drama,  perfectly  legitimate 
as  they  are,  but  dwelling  on  a  lower  level.  We  have  no 
more  right  to  expect  the  emotions  of  recognition  in  a 
melodrama  or  in  a  farce  than  we  have  in  a  detective- 
story  or  in  a  tale  of  ao!venture.  In  these  humbler  forms 
of  prose-fiction  and  of  the  drama,  the  story  itself,  the 
successive  situations,  the  plot,  are  of  primary  impor- 
tance; and  they  awaken  chiefly  the  emotions  of  sur- 
prise. The  characters  exist  for  the  sake  of  the  story  ;  the 
story  is  not  created  by  the  characters  moved  by  their 
own  volition.  When  we  go  to  a  farce  or  a  melodrama, 
we  cannot  justly  expect  to  discover  in  them  the  essential 
qualities  of  serious  drama  or  light  comedy.  We  ought 
to  be  satisfied  if  the  author  has  given  us  the  essential 
qualities  of  farce  or  of  melodrama. 


The  playgoer  is  disconcerted  when  the  story  repre- 
sented before  his  eyes  on  the  stage  is  peopled  by  char- 
acters who  seem  to  him  unreal  and  untrue  to  them- 
selves. But  he  is  willing  enough  to  accept  any  frank 
departure  from  the  actual;  he  is  not  insistent  on  the 
mere  facts  of  life.  If  he  can  get  the  deeper  truth,  he  has 
no  objections  to  make  believe  if  he  is  invited  to  do  so ; 
he  is  willing  enough  to  accopt  the  supernatural,  for 
example,  and  to  follow  with  unflagging  interest  the 
actions  and  the  words  of  ghosts,  of  witches,  and  of 
fairies,  although  he  refuses  to  credit  the  actual  exist- 
ence of  any  such  beings.  All  he  demands  is  that  these 
non-existent  creatures  shall  be  represented  as  obeying 
the  law  of  their  own  being.  He  knows  well  enough  that 
the  story  of  the  "Midsummer  Night's  Dream"  never 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  225 

happened  and  that  it  is  not  in  accord  with  the  facts  of 
life.  But  he  accepts  it  as  artistically  true,  since  the 
fairies  in  that  delightful  fantasy  are  seen  to  do  pre- 
cisely what  he  imagines  fairies  would  do  if  there  were 
any  fairies.  So  he  does  not  cavil  at  the  Ghost  in  "  Ham- 
let" or  at  the  Witches  in  "Macbeth,"  because  their 
words  and  their  deeds  are  just  what  might  be  expected 
from  such  creatures.  The  spectator  accepts  them  for 
what  they  are  in  the  play,  so  long  as  they  comport 
themselves  as  he  conceives  such  weird  embodiments 
would  comport  themselves.  He  is  glad  to  adventure 
himself  in  a  realm  of  fantasy;  but  he  expects  its  in- 
habitants to  be  bound  by  its  own  legal  code.  In  other 
words,  essential  veracity  has  no  relation  to  the  mere 
actuality  of  every-day  existence.  It  is  the  permanent 
truth  that  the  audience  expects,  not  the  accidental  fact. 

And  this  leads  us  to  a  consideration  of  the  question 
of  the  moral  influence  of  a  work  of  art.  Morality  enters 
into  art  only  when  art  deals  with  human  conduct,  when 
it  sets  before  us  that  which  may  have  an  influence 
upon  our  own  acts.  Music,  architecture,  pure  decora- 
tion, landscape  and  marine  painting,  and  also  the 
poetry  which  is  only  music  or  decoration,  —  these  forms 
of  art  have  no  moral  quality.  They  lie  wholly  outside 
of  the  domain  of  ethics.  But  the  lyric  of  human  feel- 
ing, epic  poetry,  prose-fiction,  the  drama,  —  these  are 
forms  of  art  which  deal  directly  with  human  passions ; 
and  therefore  they  cannot  evade  moral  responsibility. 
Whenever  an  artist  is  dealing  with  human  beings,  he 
is  subject  to  the  moral  law ;  and  he  must  be  judged  by 
the  ultimate  effect  of  his  portrayal  of  life.  In  man,  and 
in  man  only,  is  morality  bound  up. 

This  is  why  we  do  not  protest  against  the  customary 


226  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

puppet-play  of  "  Punch  and  Judy,"  which  we  allow  our 
children  to  laugh  at.  Considered  by  any  human  stand- 
ard of  conduct,  this  little  drama  is  hideously  immoral, 
for  it  sets  before  us  a  career  of  triumphant  and  self- 
satisfied  crime.  We  behold  Punch  rejoicing  in  a  series 
of  atrocious  assassinations ;  he  kills  his  baby ;  he  mur- 
ders his  wife;  he  slays  the  policeman;  he  hangs  the 
hangman ;  and  finally  he  beats  the  life  out  of  the  Devil 
himself.  And  throughout  the  long  succession  of  evil 
deeds,  Punch  remains  smilingly  cheerful,  wholly  un- 
conscious of  his  own  total  depravity.  And  this  is  the 
reason  why  the  little  play  is  not  really  immoral.  It  has 
no  possible  relation  to  mankind ;  and  we  never  dream  of 
applying  to  Punch,  only  a  little  figure  animated  by  the 
hand  of  the  concealed  performer,  the  strict  code  of 
human  conduct.  Punch  stands  outside  the  circle  of 
our  common  humanity;  we  do  not  accept  him  as  one 
of  ourselves ;  and  his  example  carries  no  weight. 

If  the  lamentable  tragedy  of  Punch  is  morally  in- 
nocuous, can  the  same  plea  be  made  for  other  plays, 
such  as  the  British  pantomimes  at  Christmas,  and  the 
American  musical -shows,  peopled  with  beings  of  a  fan- 
tastic unreality  ?  Probably  there  is  a  certain  validity 
in  this  plea.  These  pantomimes  and  these  musical- 
shows  are  absurdly  remote  from  life  as  we  all  know  it ; 
and  they  contain  a  very  large  element  of  fantasy.  And 
yet  they  are  performed  by  men  and  women,  after  all, 
not  by  puppets;  and  it  is  impossible  for  them  wholly 
to  escape  from  the  jurisdiction  of  the  moral  law.  It 
was  this  plea  that  Charles  Lamb  put  forward  in  behalf 
of  the  English  comedy  of  the  Restoration.  He  admitted 
that  it  was  immoral,  if  tried  by  the  ordinary  code  of 
human  conduct ;  but  he  insisted  that  the  characters  of 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  227 

Congreve  and  Wycherley  were  so  far  removed  from 
reality,  they  showed  so  contorted  a  vision  of  life,  that 
they  were  no  more  human  than  Punch.  "  The  whole  is 
a  passing  pageant,  where  we  should  sit  as  unconcerned 
at  the  issues  of  life  or  death,  as  at  the  battle  of  frogs 
and  mice,"  so  Lamb  asserted,  after  having  declared 
that  he  confessed  himself  "glad  for  a  reason  to  take 
an  airing  beyond  the  diocese  of  the  strict  conscience." 
Lamb  presented  his  paradox  with  all  his  frolicsome 
humor ;  but  none  the  less  it  is  a  paradox,  as  Macaulay 
had  no  difficulty  in  proving.  Perhaps  Lamb  himself 
could  sit  as  unconcerned  before  the  unlovely  intrigues 
of  Congreve's  gallants  and  fine  ladies  as  at  the  battle 
of  frogs  and  mice ;  but  the  rest  of  us  cannot  attain  to 
this  fanciful  detachment.  After  all,  these  gallants  and 
these  fine  ladies  are  human  beings,  going  about  their 
affairs,  and  differing  only  in  the  callousness  of  their  arid 
souls.  They  cannot  subtract  themselves  from  the  juris- 
diction of  the  moral  law,  by  renouncing  "  any  preten- 
sions of  goodness  or  good  feelings  whatsoever."  We 
feel  them  to  be  flesh  and  blood  with  us ;  and  we  apply 
to  them  properly  enough  the  standard  of  morals. 

VI 

To  say  that  the  English  comic  dramatists  of  the 
Restoration  are  immoral,  because  their  plays  convey 
a  totally  misleading  impression  of  life,  is  a  very  differ- 
ent thing  from  saying  that  they  are  blameworthy  be- 
cause their  comic  pieces  are  not  explicitly  moral.  The 
playwright  is  never  called  upon  to  be  a  preacher.  The 
direct  inculcation  of  morality  in  the  drama  or  in  prose- 
fiction  is  bad  art.  Charles  Lamb  justly  complained 
of  the  writers  who  insisted  on  tagging  a  moral  to  their 


228  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

tales,  "  like  the  God  send  the  good  ship  safe  into  harbor 
of  the  old  bills  of  lading."  We  have  cast  aside  the  an- 
tiquated theory  of  poetic-justice,  so-called,  which  prac- 
tically required  a  playwright  to  endeavor  to  prove 
that  vice  always  comes  to  a  bad  end.  This  doctrine 
obtained  generally  in  the  eighteen tlj  century;  and  we 
can  find  it  declared  emphatically  in  the  English  trans- 
lation of  d'Aubignac,  in  1684 :  — 

"  One  of  the  chiefest,  and  indeed  the  most  indispensable 
Rule  of  Drammatick  Poems,  is,  that  in  them  Virtues  ought 
always  to  be  rewarded  or  at  least  commended,  in  spight  of 
all  the  Injuries  of  Fortune ;  and  that  likewise  Vices  be  always 
punished,  or  at  least  detested  with  Horrour,  though  they 
triumph  upon  the  stage  for  that  time." 

The  doctrine  of  poetic-justice  demanded  that  the 
drama  should  be  overtly  didactic,  even  at  the  cost  of 
departing  from  the  truth  of  life.  We  all  know  that  vice 
does  not  always  come  to  a  bad  end  in  this  world,  what- 
ever may  happen  to  it  in  the  next.  We  all  know,  also, 
that  if  the  author  persists  in  blackening  his  evil  char- 
acters, he  may  end  by  arousing  our  sympathy  for  them 
as  victims  of  persecution;  and  it  seems  as  though 
Thackeray  had  not  quite  escaped  this  blunder  in  his 
insistent  unfairness  to  Becky  Sharp.  Bret  Harte  told 
us  of  a  Californian  who  contemplated  Hogarth's  series 
of  engravings  contrasting  the  careers  of  the  Idle  and 
Industrious  Apprentices,  and  who  was  moved  with  aji 
irresistible  feeling  in  favor  of  the  one  whom  the  moral- 
ist had  condemned.  It  seemed  to  him,  he  said,  that 
"the  cards  had  been  stacked  against  that  fellow  from 
the  start."  And  in  a  work  of  art,  this  is  ever  the  danger 
of  a  paraded  moral  purpose,  external  rather  than  inter- 
nal, not  inherent  in  the  theme  but  applied  to  it  from  the 


THE  ANALYSIS  OF  A  PLAY  229 

outside.  Stevenson  spoke  of  the  morality  which  is 
thrust  into  many  an  English  novel  "like  a  carpet 
thrown  over  a  railing." 

We  have  outgrown  the  demand  for  this  sign-post 
preaching.  The  artist  cannot  evade  his  moral  respon- 
sibility, if  he  chooses  to  handle  human  life ;  but  he  is 
no  longer  required  to  get  up  into  the  pulpit.  It  is  not 
the  artist's  business  to  prove  a  thesis,  but  to  picture 
life  as  he  sees  it  and  feels  it  and  knows  it.  His  attitude 
has  been  stated  admirably  by  Shelley  in  the  preface  to 
the"Cenci":  — 

"The  highest  moral  purpose  aimed  at  in  the  highest 
species  of  the  drama  is  the  teaching  of  the  human  heart, 
through  its  sympathies  and  antipathies,  the  knowledge  of 
itself;  in  proportion  to  the  possession  of  which  knowledge, 
every  human  being  is  wise,  just,  sincere,  tolerant  and  kind." 

To  teach  the  human  heart  the  knowledge  of  itself 
—  this  is  a  lofty  aim ;  and  it  can  be  attained  only  by 
resolute  honesty  in  dealing  with  the  problems  of  con- 
duct. The  artist  must  ever  be  sincere  with  himself. 
He  must  tell  the  truth  as  it  is  given  to  him  to  see 
the  truth,  to  tell  nothing  but  the  truth,  —  even  if  he 
is  not  bound  always  to  tell  the  whole  truth,  because 
it  is  not  given  to  any  man  to  grasp  the  whole  truth. 
That  he  is  privileged  and  empowered  to  do  this  is 
the  supreme  happiness  of  the  artist.  "  The  conscious 
moralist  often  seems  rather  stupid  and  arbitrary,"  so 
Professor  Gilbert  Murray  remarks ;  "  the  poet  has  the 
immense  advantage  that  he  is  not  trying  to  say  what 
he  believes  to  be  good  for  other  people,  or  what  he  be- 
lieves they  believe  to  be  good  for  them,  but  is  simply 
expressing  what  he  himself  loves  most." 

Although  the  dramatist  need  not  put  morality  into 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE   ELIZABETHAN   DRAMATISTS 

Forty  poets,  amongst  them  ten  of  superior  rank,  as  well  as  one, 
the  greatest  of  all  artists  who  have  represented  the  soul  in  words; 
many  hundreds  of  pieces,  and  nearly  fifty  masterpieces;  the  drama 
extended  over  all  the  provinces  of  history,  imagination,  and  fancy, 
—  expanded  so  as  to  embrace  comedy,  tragedy,  pastoral  and  fanci- 
ful literature,  —  to  represent  all  degrees  of  human  condition,  and  all 
the  caprices  of  human  invention,  —  to  express  all  the  perceptible 
details  of  actual  truth,  and  all  the  philosophic  grandeur  of  general 
reflection;  the  stage  disencumbered  of  all  precept  and  freed  from 
all  imitation,  given  up  and  appropriated  in  the  minutest  particulars 
to  the  reigning  taste  and  public  intelligence:  all  this  was  a  vast 
and  manifold  work,  capable  by  its  flexibility,  its  greatness,  and  its 
form,  of  receiving  and  preserving  the  exact  imprint  of  the  age  and 
o'  the  nation.  —  H.  TAINE,  History  of  English  Literature. 

I 

THERE  have  been  four  or  five  periods  in  history  when 
the  drama  has  risen  to  a  supreme  height.  The  first  of 
these  was  in  Greece  when  ^Eschylus,  Sophocles  and 
Euripides,  Aristophanes  and  Menander,  followed  one 
another  in  swift  succession.  The  second  and  the  third 
were  almost  simultaneous  in  England  and  in  Spain, 
when  Marlowe,  Shakspere,  and  Ben  Jonson  led  the 
way  in  the  one  language,  while  Lope  de  Vega  and  Cal- 
deron  revealed  the  lyrical  richness  of  the  other.  The 
fourth  was  in  France,  when  Moliere  followed  Corneille 
and  preceded  Racine.  And  we  may  perhaps  add  a  fifth 
period,  in  France  again,  in  the  middle  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  when  Victor  Hugo  and  the  elder  Dumas  were 
followed  by  Augier  and  the  younger  Dumas. 


THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS         233 

Each  of  these  epochs  of  superb  playmaking  has  its 
own  characteristics;  and  each  of  them  will  amply  re- 
ward lifelong  study.  Yet  for  us  who  have  English  as 
our  mother-tongue,  there  is  no  doubt  which  is  the 
most  interesting  of  the  five.  It  is  that  splendid  expres- 
sion of  the  poetic  power  of  our  race,  which  took  place  in 
the  spacious  days  of  Elizabeth,  and  which  died  down 
in  the  leaner  years  of  James.  In  any  study  of  the  drama 
among  us,  the  plays  of  Shakspere  and  of  his  gifted 
contemporaries  must  always  be  the  center  of  our  in- 
terest. 

There  is  no  denying  that  the  dominant  character- 
istic of  the  English-speaking  race  is  energy,  and  that 
this  energy  never  expressed  itself  in  literature  more 
completely  than  it  did  in  the  later  years  of  Elizabeth's 
reign.  There  was  then  the  most  abundant  revelation  of 
the  power  and  passion  of  this  sturdy  people,  the  most 
magnificent  luxuriance  of  its  essential  imagination,  and 
a  sudden  outflowering  of  the  vigor  of  a  hardy  and  pro- 
lific stock.  And  above  all  the  turmoil  of  those  glorious 
days,  there  towered  aloft  the  genius  of  Shakspere. 
Small  wonder  is  it  that  many  lovers  of  literature  have 
been  blinded  by  the  effulgence  of  all  this  genius,  and 
have  closed  their  eyes  to  all  except  its  glory,  unable  to 
perceive  anything  but  absolute  perfection.  So  long  have 
we  made  a  habit  of  using  a  megaphone  to  proclaim 
its  manifest  and  manifold  beauties,  that  a  microphone 
would  suffice  for  our  infrequent  and  unwilling  admis- 
sions that  all  was  not  equally  faultless  in  this  splendid 
era.  Some  of  us  still  recall  the  shock  of  surprise  with 
which  we  first  happened  upon  a  passage  in  one  of 
Matthew  Arnold's  essays,  seeming  to  suggest  that  there 
might  be  weak  places  in  Shakspere's  works,  and  that 


234  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

even  his  genius  did  not  always  maintain  him  at  the 
topmost  pinnacle  of  transcendent  achievement. 

But  to  adopt  an  attitude  of  insistent  admiration  is 
to  renounce  the  privilege  and  the  duty  of  criticism,  as 
Gautier  did  when  he  declared  that,  if  ever  he  found  a 
single  line  of  Hugo's  to  fall  short  in  any  way,  he  would 
not  confess  it  to  himself  alone,  in  a  cellar,  on  a  dark 
night.  We  deny  ourselves  the  pleasure  of  knowing 
wherein  the  Elizabethan  poets  are  truly  mighty,  if  we 
give  them  all  credit  for  all  possible  excellence,  or  if  we 
carelessly  fail  to  see  clearly  that  even  the  mightiest  of 
them  does  not  always  sustain  himself  at  his  highest 
level.  The  work  of  the  great  Elizabethans  is  what 
it  is ;  and  for  that  we  love  it.  But  also  it  is  not  what  it 
is  not ;  and  we  ought  to  be  honest  enough  not  to  claim 
for  it  the  qualities  which  it  lacks,  and  which  it  could 
not  have  because  they  are  inconsistent  with  those  it 
actually  has.  Largeness  of  vision  it  has,  and  depth  of 
insight,  and  the  gift  of  life  itself,  and  many  another 
manifestation  of  the  energy  of  the  race.  These  posses- 
sions are  beyond  question ;  and  yet,  because  it  possesses 
these  qualities,  because  it  has  sweep,  and  penetration, 
youthful  daring,  and  robust  vitality,  it  is  often  vio- 
lent, often  trivial,  often  grotesque.  Reckless  and  ill- 
restrained,  it  is  likely  to  be  wanting  in  taste  and  lacking 
in  logic.  Energy  it  has  above  all  things  else,  and  a 
compelling  imaginative  fire ;  but  balance  and  propor- 
tion it  rarely  reveals.  Infrequently  do  we  find  symmetry 
and  harmony,  —  qualities  somewhat  incompatible  with 
the  wastefulness  of  effort  always  characteristic  of  this 
masterful  people. 

More  than  any  other  group  of  the  Elizabethans,  have 
the  dramatists  suffered  from  this  practice  of  indiscrim- 


THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS         235 

inate  praise  and  from  the  absence  of  measured  apprecia- 
tion. Sometimes  it  seems  as  though  the  commentators 
have  chosen  wilfully  to  shut  their  eyes  to  everything 
they  would  wish  away.  They  have  made  no  effort  to 
free  themselves  from  the  spell  of  Lamb's  contagious  en- 
thusiasm ;  and  they  have  not  resisted  the  evil  influence  of 
the  extravagant  eulogy  habitual  with  Swinburne,  whose 
overpowering  rhetoric  once  bade  fair  to  have  as  perni- 
cious an  effect  on  literary  criticism  as  Ruskin's  over- 
powering rhetoric  had  for  a  while  upon  criticism  of 
painting.  As  Ruskin  misled  many  and  discouraged 
more,  who,  under  wiser  guidance,  might  have  learned 
in  time  to  take  keen  pleasure  in  the  painter's  art,  so 
Swinburne  by  his  indiscriminate  overpraise  must  have 
repelled  many  a  reader  who  might  have  been  lured  into 
a  liking  for  the  real  value  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatic 
poets,  if  this  had  been  set  forth  modestly. 

Many  commentators  and  critics  yield  themselves  up 
to  be  hypnotized  by  the  dramatic  poet  they  are  dealing 
with,  crediting  him  with  a  host  of  merits  and  refusing  to 
counterbalance  their  commendation  by  allowing  weight 
even  to  such  demerits  as  they  are  compelled  to  record. 
An  amusing  instance  of  this  abdication  of  the  critical 
function  can  be  found  in  the  introduction  to  a  recent 
edition  of  "Old  Fortunatus,"  in  which  the  editor  is 
permitted  to  say  that  this  comedy  of  Dekker's,  "  though 
containing  numberless  faults  in  construction,  in  weak 
and  ineffective  character-drawing,  and  in  improbable 
psychological  deduction,  is  nevertheless  one  of  the 
greatest  of  Elizabethan  dramas."  Surely,  this  is  the 
very  negation  of  criticism,  to  call  a  piece  containing 
"numberless  faults"  one  of  the  "greatest  of  dramas." 
Such  writing  is  disheartening,  not  to  term  it  dishonest. 


236  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

The  truth  is  that  "  Old  Fortunatus"  is  only  a  narrative 
in  dialogue;  it  has  little  dramaturgic  merit;  its  char- 
acter-drawing is  mere  prentice- work ;  and  it  pleases  be- 
cause of  its  primitive  unpretentiousness  and  its  fleeting 
glimpses  of  poetry.  It  has  none  of  the  broad  humor  or 
of  the  hearty  veracity  of  character  which  lends  charm  to 
its  author's  "Shoemaker's  Holiday,"  a  brisk  comedy 
of  the  contemporary  life  of  London,  which  the  sturdy 
author  knew  so  well  and  relished  so  keenly. 

ii 

In  considering  the  lack  of  playmaking  skill,  abun- 
dantly evident  in  the  works  of  the  Elizabethan  poets, 
two  points  must  ever  be  borne  in  mind.  The  first  of 
these  is  that  the  literary  form  which  happens  to  be  pop- 
ular and  therefore  profitable,  in  any  period,  attracts  to 
it  many  who  have  nttle  or  no  native  gift  for  that  special 
art.  In  the  nineteenth  century,  for  example,  the  vogue 
of  the  novel  was  overwhelming;  and  many  a  man  of 
letters  who  had  but  a  small  share  of  the  narrative  fac- 
ulty undertook  to  express  himself  in  fiction.  So,  at  the 
end  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  drama  was  the  one 
field  in  which  an  aspiring  genius  might  hope  to  make 
money ;  and  it  is  not  surprising,  therefore,  to  find  only  a 
few  among  all  the  mass  of  Elizabethan  dramatic  poets 
who  either  were  born  playwrights,  or  willingly  took  the 
trouble,  by  dint  of  hard  work,  to  master  the  secrets 
of  the  craft.  Chapman,  for  one,  had  no  natural  bent 
toward  the  theater ;  and  Webster,  for  another,  for  all  his 
striving  after  the  horrible,  does  not  prove  his  possession 
of  the  native  endowment  of  the  instinctive  playmaker. 
Chapman  and  Webster  were  poets,  beyond  all  question; 
but  they  were  not  born  playwrights. 


THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS        237 

The  second  point  to  be  kept  in  memory  is  that  the 
dramatic  art  was  not  highly  esteemed  in  Elizabeth's 
time.  The  theater  was  a  means  whereby  a  poet  might 
earn  his  living ;  but  plays  were  scarcely  held  to  be  litera- 
ture ;  they  were  devised  only  to  satisfy  the  two  hours 'traf- 
fic of  the  stage ;  they  were  looked  down  upon  by  men  of 
letters,  much  as  journalism  is  looked  down  upon  to-day. 
Accustomed  as  we  are  to  consider  the  drama  as  the 
chief  glory  of  Elizabethan  literature,  we  do  not  always 
remember  that  the  Elizabethans  themselves  scarcely 
held  it  to  be  literature  at  all.  Nothing  is  more  significant 
of  this  contemporary  opinion  than  the  fact  that  Shak- 
spere  corrected  the  proof  of  his  two  narrative  poems 
carefully,  while  he  gave  no  thought  to  the  printing  of 
his  plays,  carelessly  abandoning  the  manuscripts  to  his 
comrades  of  the  theater.  One  result  of  this  contemptu- 
ous attitude  toward  the  drama  was  that  the  poet  was 
not  held  to  any  high  standard,  and  that  what  was  good 
enough  for  the  rude  playgoing  public  of  those  turbulent 
times  was  often  good  enough  for  the  playwright  himself. 

Perhaps  it  is  well  also  to  note  a  third  point,  the  re- 
calling of  which  will  help  us  to  understand  certain  of  the 
dramaturgic  deficiencies  of  those  days ;  and  this  is  that 
the  drama  had  not  yet  come  into  its  own.  It  was  still 
imperfectly  differentiated;  it  had  not  disengaged  itself 
from  elements  wholly  undramatic.  Just  as  the  Greek 
drama  in  the  time  of  JEschylus  retained  a  lyrical  ele- 
ment which  often  delayed  the  movement  of  the  play 
itself,  so  the  English  drama  in  the  time  of  Shakspere 
had  not  freed  itself  from  elements  which  had  nothing  to 
do  with  the  setting  of  a  story  on  the  stage.  It  needs  to 
be  remembered  that,  in  those  early  days,  the  theater 
was  not  only  the  theater ;  it  was  also,  to  a  certain  extent, 


238  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

the  newspaper,  the  lecture-hall,  and  even  the  pulpit.  So 
it  is  that  we  find  the  dramatic  poet  sometimes  halting 
his  plot  to  deliver  a  lecture  or  a  sermon,  which  his  audi- 
ence received  gladly,  but  which  clogged  the  movement 
of  his  action,  and  which  is  seen  now  to  be  a  hindrance 
to  the  artistic  shaping  of  his  plot. 

Here  we  touch  the  connection  between  the  drama  as 
it  was  under  Elizabeth  and  the  drama  as  it  had  been 
under  Henry  VIII  and  his  predecessors.  An  Eliza- 
bethan playhouse  was  open  to  the  air;  it  got  its  light 
from  the  sky;  its  stage,  encumbered  with  spectators, 
had  no  drop-curtain  and  no  scenery ;  its  methods  were 
those  of  the  mystery  performed  in  the  market-place  and 
the  churchyard.  There  is  really  very  little  difference  in 
structure  between  the  miracle-play  of  the  later  Middle 
Ages  and  the  chronicle-play  of  Elizabeth's  youth.  If 
the  method  of  the  elder  is  medieval,  the  method  of  the 
younger  is  semi-medieval,  to  say  the  least.  It  could  not 
be  anything  else  until  the  roofed  and  lighted  theater 
came  into  being,  with  its  separating  drop-curtain  and 
its  realistic  scenery.  There  was  no  modern  theater  in 
London  until  after  the  Restoration ;  and  so  it  is  that  the 
Elizabethan  drama  could  not  be  modern ;  it  had  to  re- 
main at  least  semi-medieval  even  in  its  loftiest  efforts. 
It  was  not  the  fault  of  the  Elizabethan  drama  that  it 
had  not  the  severe  simplicity  of  the  ancients  or  the  neat 
dexterity  of  the  moderns ;  but  there  is  no  denying  that  it 
had  neither,  and  that  it  could  not  have  them. 

And  when  we  consider  what  were  the  actual  circum- 
stances of  performance  in  the  Globe  Theater,  our 
wonder  is  not  that  the  structure  of  Shakspere's  plays 
is  often  straggling  and  slovenly,  but  rather  that  the 
great  dramatist  was  ever  able  to  attain  to  a  more  orderly 


INTERIOR   OF  THE   FORTUNE  THEATER,   LONDON  (1599) 
From  the  restoration  by  Waller  H.  Godfrey,  Esq.,  after  the  builder's  contract 


THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS         239 

conduct  of  his  plot,  such  as  he  did  achieve  in  "  Othello '? 
and  in  "  Macbeth."  Perhaps,  indeed,  there  is  no  better 
proof  of  the  might  of  Shakspere's  genius  than  this,  — 
that  now  and  again  he  was  able  to  overcome  conditions 
which  seem  to  be  unconquerable,  and  to  produce  a  play 
which  endures  for  all  time  even  though  it  was  originally 
adjusted  adroitly  to  the  circumstances  of  performance 
upon  a  semi-medieval  stage. 

Furthermore,  the  Elizabethan  dramatist  not  only  put 
his  plays  together  in  conformity  with  the  customary 
methods  of  representation  that  obtained  in  the  Eliza- 
bethan theater,  he  also  kept  in  mind  always  the  audi- 
ence before  which  they  were  to  be  produced.  It  was  for 
the  playgoer  of  the  present  that  he  exerted  himself;  it 
was  not  for  the  reader  of  the  future.  The  absence  of 
critical  standards  and  the  contempt  of  the  acted  drama, 
account  for  many  of  the  defects  of  the  plays  of  that 
renowned  period;  but  the  chief  cause  is  ever  to  be 
sought  in  the  necessity  of  pleasing  a  special  public,  prob- 
ably far  more  brutal  in  its  longings  than  any  other  to 
which  a  great  dramatist  has  had  to  appeal.  The  Athe- 
nians, for  whom  Sophocles  built  his  massive  and  austere 
tragedies,  and  the  Parisians,  for  whom  Moliere  painted 
the  humorous  portrait  of  his  fellow-burghers,  —  these 
were  quite  other  than  the  mob  before  whom  Shakspere 
had  to  set  his  studies  from  life,  a  mob  stout  of  stom- 
ach for  sheer  horrors,  and  shrinking  from  no  atrocity. 
It  is  the  Elizabethan  public  which  is  mainly  respon- 
sible for  the  fact  that  the  Elizabethan  drama,  glorious 
as  it  is  with  splendid  episodes,  taken  separately,  has 
only  a  few  masterpieces,  only  a  few  plays  the  conduct  of 
which  does  not  continually  disappoint  even  a  cordial 
reader.  As  M.  Jusserand  has  pointed  out,  with  the 


240  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

calm  sanity  which  is  characteristic  of  French  criticism, 
it  is  not  difficult  to  select  many  "  luminous  parts,  scenes 
brilliant  or  tragic,  moving  passages,  characters  solidly 
set  on  their  feet,"  but  it  is  very  rare  indeed  to  find  com- 
plete wholes  sustained  as  a  lofty  level  of  art,  "plays 
entirely  satisfactory,  strongly  conceived,  firmly  knit 
together,  carried  to  an  inevitable  conclusion." 

in 

Why  take  the  trouble  to  knit  a  story  strongly  and 
to  deduce  its  inevitable  conclusion,  when  the  public 
the  play  had  to  please  cared  nothing  for  this  artistic 
victory?  Not  only  did  the  playgoers  of  those  days 
find  no  fault  with  the  lack  of  plausibility  in  the  conduct 
of  the  story,  with  sudden  and  impossibly  quick  changes 
in  character,  with  coincidences  heaped  up  and  with  ar- 
bitrary artificialities  accumulated;  but  these,  indeed, 
were  the  very  qualities  they  most  enjoyed.  They  pre- 
ferred the  unusual,  the  unexpected,  the  illogical;  and 
it  was  to  behold  startling  turns  of  fortune  and  to  get 
the  utmost  of  surprise  that  they  went  to  the  theater. 
We  are  now  annoyed  by  the  huddling  of  two  and  three 
stories  into  a  single  play,  wholly  unconnected,  the 
joyous  and  the  gruesome  side  by  side,  and  in  no  wise 
tied  together ;  but  to  them,  this  was  entirely  satisfactory, 
for  it  gave  them  variety,  and  this  was  what  they  were 
seeking.  We  must  always  be  ready  to  "  make  believe," 
when  we  surrender  ourselves  to  the  charm  of  these 
semi-medieval  poet  playwrights. 

No  doubt,  there  were  gallants  sitting  on  the  stage 
who  had  a  tincture  of  cultivation ;  and  there  must  have 
been  other  men  of  education  in  the  rooms  of  the  gal- 
lery. But  the  most  of  those  who  stood  in  the  yard  be- 


THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS         241 

low  were  unable  to  write  or  to  read.  Among  them  were 
discharged  soldiers  home  from  the  wars,  sailors  from 
the  ships  of  Frobisher  and  Drake,  runaway  apprentices, 
and  all  the  riffraff  and  rabble  of  a  seaport  town  which 
happened  also  to  be  the  capital  of  an  expanding  nation. 
They  were  violent  in  their  likings,  with  a  constant 
longing  for  horse-play  and  ribaldry,  and  with  a  persis- 
tent hankering  after  scenes  of  lust  and  gore.  They 
were  used  to  cock-fighting  and  bear-baiting  and  bull- 
baiting;  and  these  brutal  sports  were  shown  some- 
times within  the  very  building  where  on  other  occasions 
there  were  performances  of  those  raw  tragedies-of- 
blood,  the  plays  which  could  best  stir  the  nerves  of 
so  tumultuous  a  public.  These  supporters  of  the  stage 
were  used  to  battle,  murder,  and  sudden  death,  not  only 
in  the  theater,  but  in  daily  life,  for  there  were  scores  of 
public  executions  every  year ;  and  in  those  spectacular 
times,  the  headsman  of  the  Tower  was  a  busy  man,  with 
his  ghastly  trophies  frequently  renewed  on  the  spikes 
above  the  gate. 

The  pressure  of  the  main  body  of  playgoers  upon  the 
playwrights  was  not  unwholesome  then,  as  it  is  not 
unwholesome  now,  in  so  far  as  it  led  the  dramatic  poets 
to  avoid  preciosity  and  to  eschew  style-mongering,  —  in 
so  far  as  it  forced  them  to  deal  directly  with  life,  and  to 
handle  passion  boldly  and  amply.  But  the  playgoers 
of  those  days  had  cruder  likings  also ;  they  craved  con- 
stant excitement,  both  for  the  eye  and  for  the  ear ;  and 
the  aspiring  playwright  gave  them  good  measure, 
pressed  down  and  running  over.  For  the  pleasure  of 
the  eye,  he  lavished  processions,  coronations,  funerals, 
encampments,  single  combats  and  serried  battles. 
For  the  pleasure  of  the  ear,  he  was  prolific  of  songs, 


242  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

melancholy  or  smutty ;  and  he  never  stinted  such  other 
sounds  as  he  could  command, —  the  roll  of  the  drum, 
the  staccato  call  of  the  trumpet,  the  clangor  of  loud 
bells,  the  rattle  of  musketry,  and  the  long  reverbera- 
tion of  thunder.  Sheeted  ghosts  and  bloody  specters 
were  sure  of  their  welcome  in  advance ;  and  the  play- 
wright was  prompt  to  produce  them  whenever  he  had 
an  excuse.  He  knew  also  that  these  ignorant  playgoers 
had  a  rough  sense  of  fun  and  liked  to  laugh  heartily; 
and  so  he  sprinkled  throughout  his  pieces  a  variety  of 
ingenious  retorts  and  of  obvious  repartees,  even  de- 
scending now  and  again  to  get  his  laugh  by  the  more 
mechanical  humor  of  a  practical  joke.  Furthermore, 
he  was  aware  that,  gross  as  was  the  taste  of  the  yard- 
lings,  they  could  enjoy  pretty  sentiment,  sometimes  pre- 
sented with  simple  truth,  and  sometimes  surcharged 
with  the  utmost  of  lyric  exaggeration. 

When  we  consider  how  rank  was  the  quality  of  those 
who  stood  in  the  yard  of  the  Globe  in  those  days,  how 
deficient  their  education,  how  harsh  their  experience 
of  life,  how  rude  their  likings,  the  wonder  is  not  that 
the  play  prepared  for  their  pleasure  was  often  violent 
and  arbitrary  and  coarse,  but  rather  that  any  play  de- 
vised to  delight  them  was  ever  logical  and  elevated, 
shapely  and  refined.  If  the  best  of  Shakspere  is  for 
eternity,  the  worst  of  him  was  frankly  for  the  ground- 
lings who  were  his  contemporaries,  and  whose  inter- 
est he  had  to  arouse  and  to  retain  as  best  he  could.  It 
is  evidence  of  the  intense  practicality  which  ever  di- 
rected his  conduct  that  he  was  in  the  habit  of  taking 
over  old  plays  which  had  already  proved  their  power 
to  attract  paying  audiences.  It  is  evidence  of  his  strict 
adaptation  of  his  plays  to  his  semi-medieval  audiences 


THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS         243 

that  he  had  a  total  disregard  of  chronological,  historic, 
or  geographic  accuracy,  giving  clocks  and  cannons  to 
the  Romans  and  having  the  Italians  going  from  Verona 
to  Milan  to  take  ship  when  the  tide  served,  because 
this  was  the  mode  of  travel  most  familiar  to  the  Lon- 
doner then.  It  is  evidence  of  his  understanding  of  his 
public  that  he  is  open  in  having  his  villains  proclaim 
their  own  wickedness,  so  that  the  spectator  might  never 
be  in  doubt  as  to  their  motives. 

In  nothing  else  is  the  superiority  of  Shakspere  over 
his  contemporaries  more  obvious  than  in  the  adroit 
dexterity  with  which  he  played  upon  the  prejudices  of 
his  audience  and  made  profit  out  of  them.  He  sought 
always  to  give  the  spectators  of  his  own  time  what  he 
knew  they  wanted;  and  yet,  now  and  again,  perhaps 
a  dozen  times  in  the  score  of  years  of  his  playmaking, 
uplifted  by  his  genius  and  by  his  love  of  his  craft,  he 
looked  above  the  spectators  and  beyond  them,  and  he 
took  a  trouble  they  did  not  require  of  him.  On  these 
occasions,  all  too  few,  he  made  a  play,  pleasing  to  them 
indeed,  but  also  pleasing  to  himself,  and  to  his  own  in- 
tense artistic  enjoyment  of  technical  mastery.  So  it  hap- 
pens that  we  have  the  compact  and  logical  "  Othello," 
as  well  as  the  sprawling  and  incoherent  "  Cymbeline," 
which  came  a  few  years  afterward. 

The  most  of  his  contemporaries,  brilliant  and  highly 
gifted  as  they  were,  were  incapable  of  this,  and  they 
were  unable  to  profit  by  the  example  Shakspere  had 
set  them  in  those  of  his  plays  in  which  he  was  himself 
interested  enough  to  do  his  best  and  to  put  forth  his 
full  strength.  It  is  because  he  is  at  his  best  only  on  oc- 
casion, and  when  the  spirit  of  perfection  moved  him, 
that  he  founded  no  school.  He  was  not  a  master  to 


244  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

follow  unhesitatingly,  partly  because  the  mark  at  which 
he  aimed  was  not  always  the  best  target  for  others, 
since  he  was  willing  often  to  let  the  incomparable  fe- 
licity of  the  poet  cover  up  and  cloak  the  careless  plan- 
ning of  the  playwright ;  and  partly,  also,  because  no 
weaker  arm  could  bend  the  bow  of  Ulysses.  His  chief 
gift  was  incommunicable ;  it  was  the  power  of  endow- 
ing all  his  creatures  with  independent  life.  This  power 
is  the  test  of  his  work ;  and  it  never  leaves  him.  We  dis- 
cover it  abundantly  even  in  his  most  recklessly  arbi- 
trary plots,  and  even  in  those  of  his  episodes  which  are 
based  on  a  childish  make-believe.  It  is  not  to  the  credit 
of  critics  like  Brandes,  that  they  gloss  over  the  absurdi- 
ties that  abound  in  Shakspere's  plays,  because  Shak- 
spere  was  ready  enough  to  give  the  spectators  of  his 
own  time  the  puerile  devices  they  delighted  in,  —  the 
pound  of  flesh  and  the  trial  of  the  caskets  in  the  "  Mer- 
chant of  Venice,"  for  example,  and  the  test  of  the  affec- 
tion of  Lear's  daughters,  when  that  fatherly  monarch, 
unless  he  was  already  imbecile,  ought  to  have  learned 
the  characters  of  his  children  in  the  long  years  of  their 
family  life.  If  a  critic  does  not  see  these  absurdities,  if 
he  is  blind  to  the  arbitrary  and  muddled  plot  of  "  Cym- 
beline"  and  to  the  shocking  callousness  of  the  last  act 
of  "  Much  Ado  about  Nothing,"  then  we  may  well  doubt 
whether  he  is  really  able  to  appreciate  the  masterly 
simplicity  of  "Othello"  and  the  orderly  richness  of 
"Romeo  and  Juliet." 

IV 

The  significant  fact  is  that  Shakspere  was,  after  all, 
an  Elizabethan;  and  that,  like  the  others,  he  had  to 
accept  the  conditions  of  a  semi-medieval  theater  and 


THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS         245 

to  please  a  full-blooded  public.  The  others  cannot 
climb  with  him;  but  not  infrequently  he  sinks  with 
them.  They  were  ready  enough  to  be  satisfied  them- 
selves when  they  had  satisfied  the  playgoers  of  their 
own  day.  They  had  no  hesitation  in  sacrificing  con- 
sistency of  character  to  immediate  effect  on  the  mass 
of  spectators,  —  very  much  as  their  fellow  playwrights 
in  Spain  were  doing  at  the  same  time  and  for  the  same 
reason.  Climbing  to  impossible  heights  of  honor  or 
sinking  to  impossible  depths  of  dishonor,  abounding 
in  the  most  romantic  reversals  of  fortune  and  in  the 
most  inexplicable  transformations  of  character,  caring 
little  for  reality  or  even  for  plausibility,  disregarding 
the  delicacy  of  art  no  less  than  the  veracity  of  nature, 
they  were  fertile  in  inventing  striking  episodes;  and 
they  failed,  as  a  rule,  to  combine  the  several  parts  into 
a  coherent  whole,  sustaining  itself  throughout  and 
gathering  power  as  it  proceeded.  Capable  on  occasion 
of  the  finest  shadings  of  a  subtle  psychology,  they 
were  content,  for  the  most  part,  with  a  bald  daubing 
of  character  in  the  primary  colors.  In  other  words, 
they  often  proved  themselves  true  poets,  but  far  less 
frequently  did  they  reveal  themselves  as  real  play- 
wrights. 

This  is  the  reason  why  the  flamboyant  and  iridescent 
eulogy  of  Swinburne  is  doing  them  an  ill  service  to-day, 
while  they  gained  greatly  by  the  apt  selection  of  Lamb, 
who  artfully  singled  out  the  perfect  passages.  Only  too 
often  the  parts  are  far  finer  than  the  whole ;  and  Lamb 
presented  the  best  bits  so  enticingly  that  he  must  have 
lured  to  disappointment  many  readers  who  went 
straight  from  his  "  Specimens  "  to  the  complete  works 
of  the  several  dramatic  poets.  Here,  also,  we  may  find 


246  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

an  excuse  for  Hazlitt  and  for  Lowell,  who  have  praised 
these  poets  more  especially  as  poets  to  be  read  in  a  li- 
brary, while  almost  wholly  neglecting  to  consider  their 
plays  as  plays  intended  to  be  performed  by  actors  in 
a  theater  and  before  an  audience.  To  Hazlitt  and 
Lowell,  these  dramatic  poets  appealed  primarily  as 
poets ;  and  that  the  poets  were  also  dramatists  rarely 
arrested  the  attention  of  either  of  these  acute  critics. 

Of  a  certainty,  there  must  be  many  other  readers 
who  are  willing  enough  to  follow  the  example  of  Hazlitt 
and  of  Lowell,  and  to  accept  the  pure  poetry  which  is 
abundant  in  the  works  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists, 
without  caring  to  consider  whether  or  not  the  plays 
enriched  by  this  poetry  are  all  that  they  ought  to  be, 
merely  as  plays.  Some  of  them  may  even  be  inclined 
to  resent  any  attempt  to  call  attention  to  the  drama- 
turgic defects  of  plays  possessing  a  host  of  splendid 
passages,  wherein  poetry  combines  with  psychology  to 
give  the  keenest  pleasure.  Others  there  are  who  are 
willing  to  admit  the  existence  of  the  defects  themselves, 
but  who  deny  the  justice  of  a  criticism  which  gages  the 
semi-medieval  playwrights  by  tests  properly  applicable 
only  to  the  modern  drama.  This  protest  was  voiced 
most  persuasively  not  long  ago  by  a  devout  admirer  of 
the  old  dramatists,  who  insisted  on  the  impropriety 
of  judging  Massinger  and  Greene  by  the  standards 
proper  enough  in  judging  Scribe  and  Ibsen. 

There  is  a  certain  speciousness  in  this  claim;  but 
analysis  shows  that  it  is  not  valid.  It  may  be  unfair 
to  weigh  the  semi-medieval  Greene  and  Massinger  on 
the  same  scales  as  Scribe  and  Ibsen,  who  are  mod- 
erns; but  it  is  not  unfair  to  measure  them  by  the 
standards  we  can  derive  from  the  comparison  of  the 


THE  ELIZABETHAN  DRAMATISTS         247 

greatest  dramatists,  both  ancient  and  modern.  If  we 
find  certain  principles  of  the  art  of  playmaking  ex- 
emplified in  the  best  dramas  of  JSschylus  and  of  Soph- 
ocles, of  Shakspere  and  of  Moliere,  of  Calderon  and 
of  Racine,  of  Beaumarchais  and  of  Scribe,  of  Ibsen,  of 
Sudermann  and  of  Pinero,  it  is  not  unfair  to  consider 
these  principles  as  the  eternal  verities  of  dramaturgy, 
and  to  point  out  that  Massinger  and  Greene  fail  to 
achieve  an  excellence  of  which  we  find  frequent  ex- 
amples all  through  the  long  history  of  the  drama,  some 
of  them  a  score  of  centuries  before  Scribe  and  Ibsen 
were  born. 

At  its  best,  the  dramatist's  art  reveals  itself  as  akin 
to  the  architect's ;  and  a  really  good  play  ought  to  have 
a  solid  framework  and  a  bold  simplicity  of  planning, 
with  a  foundation  broad  enough  to  sustain  the  super- 
structure, however  massive  or  however  lofty  this  may 
prove  to  be.  It  ought  to  have  unity  of  theme,  freedom 
from  all  extraneous  matter,  veracity  of  motive,  contrast 
of  character,  clearness  of  exposition,  probability  of  in- 
cident, logical  coherence,  swift  movement,  and  culmi- 
nating intensity  of  interest.  These  qualities  can  be 
found  in  "  Agamemnon  "  and  "  (Edipus  the  King,"  as 
well  as  in  "  Othello  "  and  in  "  Tartuffe,"  in  the  "  Alcalde 
of  Zalamea"  and  in  "Phedre,"  in  the  "Barber  of  Se- 
ville "  and  in  the  "Ladies'  Battle,"  in  "Ghosts,"  in 
"  Magda,"  and  in  the  "  Second  Mrs.Tanqueray."  But 
these  qualities  are  not  to  be  found  in  any  large  degree  in 
"  Doctor  Faustus  "  or  in  the  "  Roman  Actor  " ;  and  they 
are  not  often  to  be  found  in  the  plays  of  any  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan dramatists,  —  far  more  often  in  Shakspere  than 
in  any  of  the  others. 

And  if  these  deficiencies  exist,  surely  it  is  unwise  to 


248  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

close  our  eyes  to  the  fact ;  surely  it  is  unjust  to  pretend 
that  the  Elizabethan  drama,  as  a  whole,  possesses  that 
which  it  has  not ;  surely  it  is  safer  and  honester  to  ad- 
mit frankly  that  the  art  of  building  plays  solidly  and 
symmetrically  was  little  cultivated  by  the  Elizabethan 
dramatists,  just  as  it  was  little  considered  by  the 
Elizabethan  critics.  Surely,  again,  it  is  wisest  to  try  to 
see  things  as  they  really  are  and  to  tell  the  truth  about 
them,  the  whole  truth,  and  nothing  but  the  truth. 
Even  in  criticism,  honesty  is  the  best  policy;  and  the 
Elizabethan  poets  are  indisputably  great  enough  to 
make  it  worth  while  for  us  to  assure  ourselves  wherein 
their  true  greatness  lies.  They  are  none  the  less  great 
as  poets  when  we  have  seen  clearly  that  —  excepting 
Shakspere  —  they  are  great  as  playwrights  only  occa- 
sionally, and  almost,  as  it  were,  by  accident. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE  POETIC  DRAMA  AND  THE  DRAMATIC  POEM 

The  attempt  to  write  tragedy  for  the  closet  rather  than  for  the 
stage  has  resulted  either  in  adopting  the  supposed  conditions  of  the 
Greek  or  some  other  foreign  theater,  or  in  breaking  away  from 
the  strict  limits  defined  by  the  stage  and  writing  lyrical  medleys  or 
dramatic  monologues  or  imaginary  conversations.  .  .  .  Object  as 
tragedy  rightly  may  at  times  to  the  limitations  and  trivialities  of  the 
theater,  it  cannot  safely  leave  its  precincts  without  losing  its  own 
identity. 

In  the  past  nearly  all  tragedies  of  any  effect  on  the  drama's  de- 
velopment have  not  only  been  planned  for  the  stage  but  have  suc- 
ceeded when  acted.  This  seems  likely  to  be  the  case  in  the  future. 
For  the  reader  of  a  play  is  confronted  by  difficulties  not  found  in 
other  fiction ;  and,  in  general,  only  a  play  suited  to  presentation  on 
the  stage  is  likely  to  secure  for  a  reader  the  visualization,  the  im- 
personations, the  illusion  of  actuality,  similar  to  those  experienced 
in  the  theater.  —  ASHLEY  H.  THOBNDIKE,  Tragedy. 


THE  divorce  between  poetry  and  the  drama,  visible 
in  English  literature  in  the  nineteenth  century,  is 
acknowledged  to  be  most  unfortunate  for  both  parties 
to  the  matrimonial  contract ;  and  those  of  us  who  have 
a  warm  regard  for  either  of  them  cannot  help  hoping 
that  they  may  be  persuaded  soon  to  make  up  their 
quarrel  and  get  married  again.  The  theater  is  flour- 
ishing more  abundantly  than  ever  before;  and  the 
prose-drama  of  modern  life,  dealing  soberly  and  sin- 
cerely with  the  present  problems  of  existence,  has  at 
last  got  its  roots,  into  the  soil,  and  is  certain  soon  to 
yield  a  richer  fruitage.  Perhaps  it  is  even  not  too  much 


250  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

to  foresee  the  possibility  of  a  speedy  outflowering  of 
the  drama  in  the  next  half-century,  in  the  English  lan- 
guage, as  well  as  in  the  other  tongues.  In  all  the  earlier 
epochs  of  dramatic  expansion,  the  masterpieces  of  the 
art  have  been  truly  poetic,  in  theme  and  in  treatment. 
Have  we  any  reason  to  suppose  that  our  coming  drama 
will  also  be  poetic,  both  in  essentials  and  in  externals  ? 
If  the  law  of  supply  and  demand  were  as  potent  in  the 
arts  as  it  is  in  commerce,  we  should  be  justified  in  ex- 
pecting that  return  of  the  poetic  drama,  which  is  eagerly 
awaited  by  all  who  cherish  the  muses.  But  when  we 
station  Sister  Ann  on  the  watch-tower,  and  when  we 
keep  on  asking  if  she  sees  any  one  coming,  we  ought 
to  have  in  our  own  minds  a  clear  vision  of  the  rescuer 
we  are  looking  for.  When  we  cry  aloud  for  the  poetic 
drama,  what  is  it  that  we  stand  ready  to  welcome? 
Of  course,  we  do  not  mean  that  bastard  hybrid,  the  so- 
called  closet-drama,  the  play  that  is  not  intended  to  be 
played.  A  mere  poem  in  dialogue  not  destined  for  per- 
formance by  actors,  in  a  theater,  and  before  an  audi- 
ence, may  have  interest  of  its  own  to  the  chosen  few 
who  can  persuade  themselves  that  they  like  that  sort 
of  thing;  but  it  is  not  what  the  rest  of  us  want.  The 
poetic  drama,  in  its  most  splendid  periods,  has  always 
been  adjusted  to  the  playhouse  of  its  own  time.  It 
has  always  been  dramatic,  first  of  all;  and  its  poetry 
has  been  ancillary  to  its  action.  It  is  in  the  theater,  and 
not  only  in  the  library,  that  we  desire  now  to  greet  the 
noble  muse  of  tragedy  with  her  singing  robes  about 
her.  Brunetiere  insisted  that  "  it  cannot  be  repeated 
too  often  that  a  dramatic  work  does  not  begin  to  exist 
as  such  except  before  the  footlights  by  virtue  of  the 
collaboration  and  complicity  of  the  public,  without 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    251 

which  I  assert  that  it  never  has  been  and  never  can 
be  more  than  mere  rhetoric."  In  other  words,  we  must 
ever  distinguish  sharply  between  the  poetic  play  and 
the  dramatic  poem,  between  the  compositions  in  dia- 
logue which  were  intended  to  be  spoken  on  the  stage 
itself,  and  the  compositions  in  dialogue  which  were 
intended  only  to  be  read  in  the  study.  So  long  as  these 
latter  make  no  pretence  to  be  other  than  they  are, 
dramatic  poems  and  not  genuine  plays,  they  are  legiti- 
mate enough.  It  is  only  when  their  authors  and  their 
admirers  claim  for  them  the  praise  due  to  the  true 
drama  that  we  must  make  a  swift  protest.  The  true 
poetic  drama  designed  for  the  actual  theater  and  the 
dramatic  poem  intended  only  for  the  library  are  dis- 
tinct things;  they  are  essentially  unlike;  and  there  is 
danger  in  any  attempt  to  confuse  them.  The  dramatic 
poem  becomes  illegitimate  only  when  it  claims  to  be 
judged  as  a  poetic  drama;  then  it  stands  exposed  as  a 
mere  pretender  to  a  crown  belonging  to  another. 

Yet,  like  other  pretenders,  it  does  not  lack  advocates. 
One  of  these  has  boldly  asserted  that  the  so-called 
closet-drama  "  is  a  quite  legitimate  product  of  literary 
jirt/'  since  "the  playhouse  has  no  monopoly  of  the 
dramatic  form."  This  assertion  reveals  a  misunder- 
standing of  the  essential  principles  of  the  drama,  as 
all  students  of  its  history  will  instinctively  feel.  They 
cannot  help  believing  that  the  playhouse  has  now,  has 
had  in  the  past,  and  must  always  have,  a  monopoly 
of  the  dramatic  form.  And  they  can  see  clearly  enough 
that  the  closet-drama  is  generally  the  offspring  of  the 
unwillingness  or  the  inability  of  certain  poets  to  ac- 
quire the  craft  of  the  theater,  —  the  special  craft  which 
makes  \he  dramatist  what  he  is. 


252  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

Probably  no  one  of  its  admirers  would  dispute  a 
definition  to  the  effect  that  a  closet-drama  is  a  play 
not  intended  to  be  played.  It  is  a  poem  in  dialogue, 
conceived  with  no  thought  of  the  actual  stage,  not 
contaminated  by  any  subservience  to  the  playhouse, 
the  players,  or  the  playgoers.  It  is  wrought  solely  for 
the  reader  in  the  library,  without  any  regard  for  the 
demands  of  possible  spectators  in  the  auditorium.  If 
we  accept  this  definition,  we  find  ourselves  able  to  sub- 
tract from  any  catalogue  of  the  so-called  closet-drama 
two  important  groups,  one  containing  poetic  plays 
and  the  other  dramatic  poems.  First  of  all,  there  is 
the  group  represented  by  Tennyson's  "  Becket."  If 
a  closet-drama  is  a  dramatic  poem  not  intended  to 
be  played,  then.  "  Becket "  is  not  a  closet-drama,  for 
Tennyson  did  intend  it  to  be  played.  And  Tennyson 
was  not  the  author  of  a  single  closet-drama,  since  he 
meant  all  his  plays  to  be  acted,  and  was  even  intensely 
anxious  that  they  should  be  seen  in  the  theater,  reveal- 
ing his  readiness  to  make  whatsoever  modifications, 
suppressions,  or  additions  the  managers  might  suggest 
to  him.  That  these  plays  met  with  little  success  on  the 
stage  itself  can  be  accounted  for  either  by  asserting 
that  the  laureate  was  without  the  dramaturgic  faculty, 
or  by  admitting  that  he  did  not  take  the  trouble  to 
master  the  necessary  technic  of  the  theater.  Brown- 
ing's "  Straff ord "  and  "  A  Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon"  were 
written  not  only  to  be  acted,  but  to  be  acted  by  one 
particular  actor.  And  as  Browning  had  Macready  in 
view,  so  Shelley  had  Miss  O'Neill  in  view  when  he 
wrote  the  "Cenci. "  Coleridge  composed  "Remorse" 
and  Johnson  wrote  "Irene"  to  be  performed,  and  they 
were  performed. 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    253 

If  these  poetic  plays  failed  in  the  theater,  this  is 
partly  because  their  authors  did  not  keep  an  eye  single 
on  the  stage.  They  may  have  had  the  impatient  spec- 
tator in  mind,  but  they  had  also  the  leisurely  reader; 
and  as  a  result  they  fell  between  two  stools.  They 
laid  themselves  open  to  the  reproach  which  Stendhal 
brought  against  Manzoni's  dramatic  poems,  that  the 
"characters  seem  to  be  held  back  by  the  pleasure  of 
finding  fine  words."  And  they  failed  to  take  to  heart 
the  warning  which  Goethe  expressed  to  Eckermann  in 
1826 :  "  When  a  play  makes  a  deep  impression  on  us  in 
reading,  we  think  it  will  do  the  same  on  the  stage,  and 
that  we  could  obtain  such  a  result  with  little  trouble. 
But  a  piece  that  is  not  originally,  by  the  intent  and  skill 
of  the  poet,  written  for  the  boards,  will  not  succeed. 
Whatever  is  done  to  it,  it  will  always  remain  unmanage- 
able." And  then  he  added  out  of  his  own  experience: 
"  What  trouble  have  I  taken  with  '  Gotz,'  —  and  yet 
it  will  not  go  right  as  an  acting-play."  ^ 

The  dramatic  poems  of  another  class  can  be  con- 
sidered as  closet-dramas  only  by  stretching  the  defini- 
tion, since  they  are  frankly  dramatic  poems,  not  copy- 
ing the  outward  form  of  the  modern  play.  This  second 
group  includes  Arnold's  "Empedocles  on  Etna"  and 
Swinburne's  "Atalanta  in  Calydon,"  and  all  the  other 
attempted  resuscitations  of  Greek  tragedy.  The  most 
obvious  characteristic  of  these  attempts  to  resuscitate 
a  departed  form  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  they 
are  deliberate  imitations.  They  are  exercises  in  poetry 
to  be  ranked  with  the  anatomies  of  the  old  painters. 
They  are  pastiches,  as  the  French  call  them;  and  the 
poet  has  found  his  chief  interest  in  recalling  the  flavor 
of  a  day  that  has  gone  forever.  They  may  reveal  the 


254  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

range  of  the  metrical  artist's  accomplishment  and  his 
ingenuity  in  grappling  with  the  endless  difficulties  of 
a  revival  which  can  never  be  really  successful,  since  it 
is  frankly  impossible  for  a  modern  poet  to  put  himself 
back  into  the  skin  of  a  Greek  of  old  and  to  strip  himself 
of  all  the  accretions  of  thought  and  feeling  that  he  has 
inherited  from  the  long  centuries  separating  him  from 
the  Athenians.  "Atalanta  in  Calydon"  may  be  the 
most  Greek  of  all  English  imitations  of  Attic  tragedy; 
but  it  is  intensely  modern  and  intensely  English,  none 
the  less.  It  is  not  by  imitations,  however  adroit  and 
however  skilful,  that  a  poet  can  establish  his  fame, 
even  though  an  imitation  or  two  may  serve  to  broaden 
our  appreciation  of  his  craftsmanship.  Lowell  was 
considering  Swinburne's  "Atalanta  in  Calydon"  when 
he  declared  that  "every  attempt  at  reproducing  a  by- 
gone excellence  by  external  imitation  of  it,  or  even  by 
applying  the  rules  which  analytic  criticism  has  formu- 
lated from  the  study  of  it,  has  resulted  in  producing 
the  artificial,  not  the  artistic."  And  in  the  same  essay, 
there  is  another  passage  which  also  demands  quota- 
tion here:  "The  higher  kinds  of  literature,  the  only 
kinds  that  live  on,  because  they  had  life  at  the  start, 
are  not  the  fabric  of  scholarship,  of  criticism,  diligently 
studying  and  as  diligently  copying  the  best  models,  but 
are  much  rather  born  of  some  genetic  principle  in  the 
character  of  the  people  and  the  age  that  produce 
them." 

ii 

The  real  reason  why  the  closet-drama  fails  to  justify 
itself  is  that  it  is  too  easy.  Nothing  is  more  stimulating 
to  the  artist  than  the  necessity  of  grappling  with  dif- 
ficulty. Then  and  then  only  is  he  forced  to  put  forth 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    255 

his  whole  strength.  To  make  his  work  easier  in  any  way, 
to  relax  the  bonds,  to  let  down  the  bars,  —  this  is  not 
to  help  the^ artist ;  it  is  to  hinder  him  from  lofty  achieve- 
ment. As  Huxley  once  said,  it  is  when  a  man  can  do 
as  he  pleases  that  his  troubles  begin.  A  strong  nature 
is  ever  anxious  for  a  wrestle  with  an  opposing  force; 
and  he  knows  very  well  how  the  strain  braces  his 
muscles.  This  is  what  is  forgotten  by  the  admirers  of 
the  closet-drama,  one  of  whom  once  ventured  to  set 
up  this  claim  for  it :  — 

"As  the  closet-dramatist  is  not  bound  to  consider  the 
practical  exigencies  of  the  theater,  to  consult  the  prejudices 
of  the  manager  or  the  spectators,  fill  the  pockets  of  the  com- 
pany, or  provide  a  role  for  a  star  performer,  he  has,  in  many 
ways,  a  freer  hand  than  the  professional  playwright.  He 
need  not  sacrifice  truth  of  character  and  probability  of  plot 
to  the  need  of  highly  accentuated  situations.  He  does  not  have 
to  consider  whether  a  speech  is  too  long,  too  ornate  in  dic- 
tion, too  deeply  thoughtful  for  recitation  by  an  actor.  If  the 
action  lags  at  certain  points,  let  it  lag.  In  short,  as  the  aim 
of  the  closet-dramatist  is  other  than  the  playwright's,  so  his 
methods  may  be  independent." 

Now,  almost  every  advantage  which  is  here  claimed 
for  the  writer  of  the  closet-drama  is  in  reality  a  disad- 
vantage. The  more  willingly  a  poet  avails  himself  of 
these  licenses,  the  more  remote  must  the  result  be  from 
the  true  drama,  as  Shakspere  and  Moliere  conceived  it, 
with  their  careful  adjustment  of  their  characters  to  the 
actors  of  their  own  companies  and  with  their  keen  in- 
terest in  the  takings  at  the  door.  The  poet  stands  re- 
vealed as  a  shrinking  weakling  when  he  wants  to  cast 
off  the  shackles  that  all  the  supreme  dramatists  have 
worn  lightly.  If  the  aim  of  the  closet-dramatist  is  other 
than  that  of  the  playwright,  and  if  his  methods  are 


256  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

independent,  then  in  all  fairness  the  conclusion  ought 
to  follow  that  his  achievement  is  not  drama.  There  is  a 
taint  of  unreality  about  it.  A  closet-drama  of  this  sort 
irresistibly  recalls  a  summer  cottage  with  its  shingled 
turret  and  with  a  parapet  carefully  machiolated  so  that 
the  residents  can  the  more  readily  pour  molten  lead  on 
the  besiegers.  "  When  you  build  a  portcullis  to  let  in 
cows,  not  to  exclude  marauders,  it  is  apt  to  become 
rather  ludicrously  unreal ;  if  you  know  that  your  play 
is  to  be  read  and  not  to  be  seen,  the  whole  dramatic 
arrangement  is  on  the  way  to  become  a  mere  sham," 
said  Sir  Leslie  Stephen,  who  then  asked :  "  Why  bother 
yourself  to  make  the  actors  tell  a  story,  when  it  is 
simpler  and  easier  to  tell  it  yourself  ? " 

In  the  dedicatory  epistle  to  his  collected  poems, 
Swinburne  asserted  that  when  he  wrote  plays,  it  was 
"  with  a  view  to  their  being  acted  at  the  Globe,  the  Red 
Bull,  or  the  Blackfriars,"  —  the  semi-medieval  play- 
houses with  which  the  Elizabethan  playwrights  had  to 
be  content,  since  they  knew  no  other,  and  to  the  con- 
ditions of  which  they  carefully  conformed  their  plays. 
And  in  discussing  his  own  "Marino  Faliero,"  Swin- 
burne declared  that  this  dramatic  poem,  "hopelessly 
impossible  as  it  is  from  the  point  of  view  of  modern 
stagecraft,  could  hardly  have  been  found  too  untheatri- 
cal,  too  utterly  given  over  to  thought  without  action, 
by  the  audience  which  endured  and  applauded  Chap- 
man's eloquence  —  the  fervid  and  inexhaustible  de- 
clamation which  was  offered  and  accepted  as  a  sub- 
stitute for  study  of  character  and  interest  of  action, 
when  his  two  finest  plays,  if  plays  they  can  be  called, 
found  favor  with  an  incredibly  intelligent  and  an  in- 
conceivably tolerant  audience." 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    257 

The  first  comment  to  be  made  upon  this  character- 
istic vaunting  is  that  we  do  not  know  whether  Chap- 
man's plays  did  or  did  not  find  favor  with  Elizabethan 
playgoers ;  and  the  second  is  that  these  playgoers  may 
have  tolerated  the  eloquence  and  the  declamation  for 
the  sake  of  the  violently  melodramatic  plots  which  held 
the  plays  together.  A  third  comment  would  be  to  deny 
incredible  intelligence  to  the  audiences  of  Chapman's 
time  and  place.  And  a  fourth  would  point  out  that 
eloquence  belongs  to  the  oration  and  not  to  the  drama, 
and  that  the  proper  place  for  declamation  is  the  plat- 
form and  not  the  stage,  which  expects  —  and  has  a  ] 
right  to  expect  —  the  "interest  of  action"  and  the ! 
"  study  of  character." 

But  there  is  really  little  need  of  comment,  since 
Swinburne  revealed  a  total  inability  to  understand  the 
drama  as  that  has  been  understood  by  all  the  really 
dramatic  poets  from  Sophocles  to  Ibsen,  and  by  all  the 
real  dramatic  critics  from  Aristotle  to  Lessing.  It  is 
true  that  Sidney,  who  had  been  infected  by  the  sterile 
theoretic  criticism  of  the  Italian  Renascence,  believed 
that  the  English  dramatists  ought  to  model  themselves 
on  the  great  Greeks;  and  yet  Swinburne  himself  has 
never  found  fault  with  Shakspere  for  rejecting  this 
advice  and  for  adjusting  his  plays  to  the  actual  theater 
of  his  own  time.  It  is  curious  that  Swinburne,  whose 
adoration  for  Hugo  is  almost  as  perfervid  as  his  ad- 
miration for  Shakspere,  did  not  follow  their  example. 
Shakspere  was  satisfied  with  the  stage  as  he  found  it, 
semi-medieval  and  unworthy  of  his  genius  as  it  may 
seem  to  us.  Hugo,  who  had  perhaps  little  more  of  the 
native  dramaturgic  gift  than  Swinburne  himself,  went 
to  school  to  the  professional  playwrights  whose  melo- 


258  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

dramas  were  popular  in  his  youth,  and  absorbed  their 
processes.  The  poet  of  "Hernani"  was  no  closet- 
dramatist;  his  aim  was  that  of  the  professional  play- 
wrights, and  he  took  over  the  skeleton  of  melodramatic 
action  which  they  had  devised  to  please  the  multitude, 
flinging  over  it  the  splendor  of  his  lyric  verse,  with  the 
result  of  evoking  from  Swinburne  the  assertion  that  he 
was  a  dramatist  of  "  the  race  and  lineage  of  Shakspere." 

in 

It  is  curious  also  that  Swinburne,  in  his  study  of 
French  literature,  had  not  observed  that  the  foremost 
critics  of  France  have  never  a  good  word  for  the  closet- 
drama,  —  perhaps  because  the  closet-drama  has  rarely 
tempted  the  French  poets,  who  have  generally  con- 
tented themselves  with  the  theater  as  it  happened  to 
exist  when  they  took  up  the  art  of  the  dramatist.  Ros- 
tand has  found  his  profit  in  writing  for  the  stage  as  it 
is;  and  even  Musset,  who  turned  his  back  on  it  for 
a  season,  composed  his  poetic  fantasies  so  closely  in 
accord  with  its  conditions  that  they  needed  very  little 
modification  when  they  were  transferred  from  the 
library  to  the  theater. 

In  Great  Britain  and  in  the  United  States,  in  the 
nineteenth  century,  while  these  closet-dramas  were 
being  published,  there  was  no  scarcity  of  actors  capable 
of  performing  characters  loftily  conceived ;  and  these 
actors  were  many  of  them  eager  for  new  parts  worthy 
of  their  histrionic  ability.  And  the  continued  popu- 
larity of  Shakspere's  plays  in  the  theater  proves  also 
that  there  was  no  lack  of  audiences  ready  to  welcome 
new  poetic  dramas,  if  only  these  novelties  resembled 
the  plays  of  Shakspere  in  being  dramatic  as  well  as 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    259 

poetic.  There  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  the  poets 
of  the  English  language  would  have  failed  in  the  play- 
house any  more  than  the  poets  of  the  French  lan- 
guage failed,  if  these  English  poets  had  followed  the 
example  of  Hugo  and  of  Rostand,  and  had  taken  the 
time  and  the  trouble  needful  to  master  the  methods  of 
the  contemporary  theater.  But  this  is  what  they  were 
not  willing  to  do ;  they  shrank  from  the  toil ;  and  there- 
fore they  cannot  now  claim  the  guerdon  due  only 
to  that  successful  conquest  of  difficulty  which  sus- 
tains the  masterpieces  of  every  art.  They  chose  the 
easier  path  and  they  wrote  poems  in  dialogue,  devoid 
of  the  essential  qualities  of  the  drama,  even  if  rich  in 
the  essential  qualities  of  poetry.  What  right  have  they 
now  to  the  same  laurel  we  bestow  on  Hugo  and  on 
Rostand  ?  It  is  almost  as  though  they  had  composed 
music  with  no  understanding  of  the  several  instruments 
which  make  up  the  modern  orchestra,  and  with  no 
intention  that  the  composition  should  ever  be  heard. 
It  is  a  significant  fact  in  the  history  of  literature  that 
the  closet-drama  has  appeared  only  when  there  is  a 
divorce  between  literature  and  the  theater.  It  isjirstl 
seen  in  Rome  under  Nero,  when  the  stage  was  given 
over  to  vulgar  and  violent  spectacle;  and  so  Seneca' 
seems  to  have  polished  his  plays  solely  for  recitation 
by  an  elocutionist.  It  is  visible  again  in  Italy,  when 
men  of  letters,  enamored  of  the  noble  severity  of  Greek 
tragedy  and  of  the  artistic  propriety  of  Latin  comedy, 
despised  the  ruder  miracle-plays  and  the  lively  but 
acrobatic  comedy-of -masks,  which  were  the  only  types 
of  drama  then  popular  on  the  stage;  and  they  there- 
fore attempted  empty  imitations  of  the  classic  drama- 
tists with  no  regard  to  the  conditions  of  the  contempo- 


260  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

rary  theater.  It  emerged  once  more  in  England  early 
in  the  nineteenth  century,  when  adaptations  of  Kotze- 
bue,  and  later  of  Scribe  and  his  cloud  of  collabora- 
tors, were  the  chief  staple  of  the  stage,  and  when  the 
overwhelming  vogue  of  the  "  Waverley  "  novels  drew 
the  attention  of  authors  away  from  the  drama  to  the 
novel,  which  was  easier  to  write,  easier  to  bring  before 
the  public,  and  more  likely  to  bring  in  an  adequate  re- 
ward. Behind  every  appearance  of  the  closet-drama,  we 
can  discover  a  latent  contempt  for  the  actual  theater, 
and  a  desire  to  claim  its  rewards  without  the  trouble 
of  mastering  its  methods  or  the  risk  of  facing  its  perils. 
This  is  why  the  closet-drama  has  never  appeared  in 
any  period  of  affluent  dramatic  productivity,  for  then  the 
poets  who  happen  also  to  be  dramatists  are  glad  to 
study  out  the  secrets  of  theatrical  technic  and  to  brave 
the  dangers  of  actual  performance. 

Even  if  there  were  some  slight  excuse  for  the  ap- 
pearance of  the  closet-drama  in  Rome  under  Nero  and 
in  Italy  during  the  Renascence,  there  was  none  for 
its  revival  in  England  in  the  nineteenth  century,  when 
actors  and  audiences  were  alike  waiting  to  recognize 
and  to  reward  a  new  dramatic  poet.  For  its  continued 
existence  in  the  twentieth  century  there  is  still  less  ex- 
cuse, since  Ibsen  has  shown  us  how  the  austerest  themes 
may  be  treated  in  the  modern  theater.  The  poet  of 
our  time  has  no  right  now  to  despise  the  stage,  where 
Shakspere  and  Ibsen  are  accepted ;  he  has  no  right  lazily 
to  refuse  to  comply  with  its  conditions,  if  he  wishes  to 
win  its  rewards.  The  drama  is  not  for  the  library,  but 
for  the  theater;  and  it  is  not  for  the  joy  of  the  little 
group  of  dilettants,  but  for  the  stimulation  of  the  public 
as  a  whole.  It  was  the  wise  Boileau  who  once  said  that 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    261 

"  even  when  a  work  is  approved  by  a  small  number  of 
Connoisseurs,  if  it  is  not  filled  with  a  certain  pleasure 
for  the  general  taste  of  men,  it  will  never  pass  for  good, 
and  at  the  end  the  connoisseurs  themselves  will  admit 
that  they  were  at  fault  in  giving  it  their  approbation." 

IV 

The  closet-drama  is  like  poverty  in  that  it  is  always 
with  us;  and  it  is  far  removed  from  the  poetic  drama 
which  we  hoped  to  see  revived  in  our  language.  But 
what  is  the  exact  nature  of  this  poetic  drama  that  we 
long  for  ?  It  is  not,  or  at  least  it  ought  not  to  be,  a  sort 
of  dramatized  historical  novel,  full  of  high  deeds  and 
pretty  words,  a  costume-play  in  blank  verse,  as  empty 
of  true  poetic  inspiration  as  the  "  Virginius"  of  Sheri- 
dan Knowles  or  the  "Richelieu"  of  Bulwer  Lytton. 
In  the  illuminating  address  on  "Literature  and  the 
Modern  Drama,"  which  Mr.  Henry  Arthur  Jones 
delivered  at  Yale  in  the  fall  of  1906,  he  asserted  that 
playgoers  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic  have  a  notion 
that  a  costume-play,  with  its  scenes  laid  anywhere 
except  in  the  last  half-century  and  with  its  personages 
talking  "a  patchwork  diction,  compounded  of  every 
literary  style  from  Chaucer  to  a  Whitechapel  coster- 
monger,"  seems  to  have  a  literary  distinction  and  a 
profound  significance  "which  rank  it  immeasurably 
above  the  mere  prose  play  of  modern  every-day  life," 
and  which  give  to  the  ravished  spectator  an  elevation  of 
mind  and  "  a  vague  but  gratifying  sense  of  superiority." 

Probably  this  notion  is  to  be  found  in  the  heads  of 
not  a  few  playgoers,  pleased  with  the  belief  that  they 
are  revealing  themselves  possessed  of  fine  literary  dis- 
crimination when  they  pay  their  money  to  behold  a 


262  A  STUDY  OF   THE  DRAMA 

costume-play  in  blank  verse.  But  the  clothes  of  long 
ago  and  the  lines  of  ten  syllables  have  no  power  in 
themselves  to  confer  literary  merit,  even  when  they 
are  united.  These  are  but  the  trappings  of  the  muse, 
often  laid  aside  when  she  warms  to  her  singing.  They 
may  deck  a  play  wholly  artificial,  unreal,  false  to  life, 
—  and  therefore  wholly  devoid  of  literary  merit.  It 
ought  to  be  evident  to  us  all  that  an  unpretending 
farce  which  has  happened  to  catch  and  to  fix  a  few 
of  the  foibles  of  the  moment  is  really  more  worthy  of 
serious  critical  consideration  than  a  tawdry  melodrama, 
bombasted  with  swelling  sonorities  and  peopled  by 
heroes  strutting  in  the  toga  or  stiff  in  chain-armor.  It 
ought  to  be  evident  also  that  this  farce,  in  so  far  as 
it  has  its  roots  in  reality,  is  a  better  augury  for  the 
future  of  the  drama,  and  may  have  even  more  genuine 
literary  quality,  than  the  pretentious  costume-play  in 
blank  verse,  illumined  by  no  gleam  of  true  poetry. 

Poetry,  essential  poetry,  is  not  a  matter  of  versifying 
only.  Many  a  play  in  verse  is  prosy,  whether  written 
in  French  alexandrines  or  in  English  pentameters. 
Many  a  play  in  humble  prose  is  shot  through  and 
through  with  the  radiance  of  poesy.  Perhaps  the  most 
truly  poetic  dramas  of  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury are  the  little  pieces  of  M.  Maeterlinck ;  and  neither 
the  "Intruder"  nor  "Pelleas  and  Melisande"  is  in 
verse.  Certainly  the  most  poetic  plays  of  the  middle 
of  the  nineteenth  century  are  the  delicious  fantasies 
of  Alfred  de  Musset;  and  "On  ne  badine  pas  avec 
1'amour,"  and  its  fellows,  did  not  need  the  aid  of  verse. 
And  it  would  be  easy  to  give  many  another  example. 
Aldrich's  "Judith,"  for  instance,  which  is  in  verse, 
is  not  only  less  dramatic,  it  is  actually  less  poetic  than 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC   POEM    263 

his  "Mercedes,"  which  is  in  prose.  More  significant 
still  is  the  fact  that  the  most  charmingly  lyric  of  all 
the  comedies  of  Shakspere,  "As  You  Like  It,"  filled 
with  the  fragrance  of  young  love  and  of  perennial 
springtime,  is  very  largely  in  prose.  So  is  the  sleep- 
walking scene  of  Lady  Macbeth,  tense  with  tragic 
emotion  and  lifted  to  the  loftier  altitudes  of  poetry. 

It  may  not  be  too  bold  to  suggest  that  Shakspere 
knew  what  he  was  about.  He  had  the  right  instinctive 
feeling;  and  he  varied  his  instrument  as  the  spirit 
moved  him.  Nothing  will  better  repay  study  than  the 
skill  with  which  Shakspere,  in  "  Julius  Caesar,"  for 
example,  commingled  blank  verse  and  rhythmic  prose 
and  the  plainer  speech  of  every  day,  giving  the  verse 
to  his  nobler  characters,  Brutus  and  Cassius  and 
Antony,  letting  the  cadence  of  balanced  sentences  fall 
from  the  lips  of  those  less  important,  and  bestowing 
the  simplest  words  on  the  mob  of  under  citizens.  A 
modern  dramatic  poet  could  scarcely  have  refrained 
from  sustaining  the  whole  of  "As  You  Like  It"  and 
"Macbeth"  and  "Julius  Caesar"  at  the  higher  level 
of  blank  verse.  And  even  Shakspere's  contemporaries 
had  not  his  instinctive  art.  Massinger,  for  one,  often 
used  verse  in  plays  of  contemporary  life,  such  as  the 
"New  Way  to  pay  Old  Debts,"  which  demanded 
rather  the  realistic  directness  of  prose.  This  has  led 
astray  many  of  the  later  imitators  of  the  Elizabeth- 
ans, —  Sheridan  Knowles,  for  example,  whose  "  Hunch- 
back" is  in  the  blankest  of  verse. 

The  dramatic  poets  of  the  other  modern  languages 
have  sometimes  fallen  into  the  same  error.  Augier's 
"Paul  Forestier"  deals  with  a  highly  emotional  situa- 
tion in  modern  life ;  but  it  loses  more  than  it  gains  from 


264  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

its  verse.  Ibsen  eschewed  verse  after  he  had  written 
"  Love's  Comedy,"  which  is  the  least  significant  of  all 
his  modern  plays ;  and  he  declared  that  prose  was  not 
only  more  appropriate  to  plays  of  contemporary  char- 
acter, but  "incomparably  more  difficult."  We  ought 
to  be  able  to  see  that  "When  We  Dead  Awaken"  and 
the  "Intruder"  and  "On  ne  badine  pas"  are  truly 
poetic,  although  in  prose,  whereas  "Richelieu"  and 
"  Virginius  "  are  emphatically  prose,  although  in  verse. 
It  is  not  the  cowl  that  makes  the  monk,  said  the  medi- 
eval proverb.  Perhaps  it  may  seem  like  bad  manners 
to  look  Pegasus  in  the  mouth;  but  it  is  good  sense  to 
see  that  he  is  entered  for  the  right  race  before  we  be- 
stride him. 

Although  the  dramatic  poets  of  other  modern  lan- 
guages have  also  made  the  mistake  of  employing  verse 
when  prose  would  have  served  their  purpose  better, 
it  is  the  dramatic  poets  of  the  English  language  who 
have  most  often  been  guilty  of  the  blunder.  And  this 
is  due,  no  doubt,  to  the  weight  of  the  example  set  by 
the  Elizabethan  dramatists.  What  these  earlier  poets 
did  spontaneously,  the  later  bards  have  striven  to  do 
by  main  strength.  Most  of  the  Elizabethans  used 
blank  verse  indiscriminately,  whether  their  theme  was 
poetic  or  not.  Even  Shakspere  employed  it  in  handling 
subjects  essentially  unpoetic,  as  in  "All's  Well"  and 
"  Measure  for  Measure."  It  is  a  question  whether  the 
overwhelming  influence  of  the  Elizabethans  has  not 
hampered  the  true  development  of  a  later  English 
poetic  drama.  They  set  a  standard;  and  they  have 
been  copied  in  their  defects  no  less  than  in  their  vir- 
tues; indeed,  their  defects  have  proved  far  easier  of 
*  imitation  than  their  finer  qualities. 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    265 

Our  modern  theaters  impose  on  the  modern  play- 
wright very  different  conditions  from  those  which  the 
semi-medieval  Elizabethan  playhouse  imposed  on  the 
Elizabethan  playwright.  This  may  be  a  gain  or  it  may 
be  a  loss;  beyond  all  question,  it  is  a  fact.  Just  as  the 
drama  of  the  Athenians  would  have  been  a  bad  model 
for  the  Elizabethans,  so  the  drama  of  the  Elizabethans 
is  a  bad  model  for  the  poets  of  to-day.  This  is  not  only 
because  the  earlier  English  plays  were  conditioned  by 
the  earlier  English  theater,  but  also  because  certain 
medieval  traditions  survived  with  the  result  that  much 
that  was  not  truly  dramatic  was  tolerated  in  a  play  and 
even  expected.  The  absence  of  scenery  tempted  the 
poet  to  passages  of  pure  description,  just  as  the  pre- 
sence of  actors  who  had  been  choir-boys  tempted  him 
to  lyrics  introduced  often  for  their  own  sake.  Nowa- 
days the  drama  has  shed  these  extraneous  elements 
and  is  sufficient  unto  itself.  The  actors  of  our  own 
time  have  rarely  had  a  training  as  singers  also ;  and  the 
scenery  of  our  time  renders  it  needless  for  a  poet  to 
indulge  in  description. 


The  drama  has  cast  out  all  that  is  undramatic;  and 
it  has  now  no  room  for  anything  but  the  action  and  the 
characters.  It  is  compacter  than  ever  before;  and  it 
rejects  not  only  description  but  also  narrative.  Its 
duty  is  to  show  what  was  done  and  the  consequences 
of  the  deed ;  and  it  has  neither  time  nor  space  for  nar- 
rative for  its  own  sake,  however  beautiful  in  itself. 
Here  is  one  weakness  of  the  modern  poets  who  write 
plays,  Mr.  Stephen  Phillips,  for  one.  His  verse  is  often 
epic  or  lyric  or  idyllic  rather  than  dramatic.  He  is 


266  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

felicitous  in  polished  narrative  and  in  suggestive  de- 
scription, but  he  more  rarely  achieves  the  stark  bold- 
ness of  vital  drama,  when  the  speaker  has  no  time  and 
no  temper  for  fanciful  comparisons  or  adroit  allitera- 
tions, and  when  his  phrase  ought  to  flash  out  suddenly 
like  a  sword  from  its  scabbard.  His  lines  have  often 
a  beauty  of  their  own,  but  it  is  a  conscious  and  elabo- 
rate beauty  out  of  place  when  the  action  tightens  and 
a  human  soul  must  be  bared  by  a  word.  They  lack 
that  unforced  simplicity,  that  colloquial  ease,  that  inev- 
itable naturalness  which  grip  us  in  the  great  moments 
of  Shakspere. 

How  unadorned  are  the  words  of  Viola  and  how  full 
of  meaning  and  of  melody  also,  when  she  has  told  the 
Duke  of  her  alleged  sister's  unspoken  love.  He  asks :  — 

"But  died  thy  sister  of  her  love,  my  boy  ?  " 
And  she  answers :  — 

"I  am  all  the  daughters  of  my  father's  house, 
And  all  the  brothers,  too;  and  yet  I  know  not 
Sir,  shall  I  to  this  lady?" 

Consider  also  how  free  from  fine  language  and 
phrase-making,  how  completely  devoid  of  simile  and 
metaphor,  and  yet  how  vitally  poetic,  is  the  parting 
of  Romeo  from  Juliet :  — 

Juliet,   I  have  forgot  why  I  did  call  thee  back. 
Romeo.   Let  me  stand  here  till  thou  remember  it. 
Juliet.   I  shall  forget,  to  have  thee  still  stand  here, 

Remembering  how  I  love  thy  company. 
Romeo.   And  I  '11  still  stay,  to  have  thee  still  forget, 

Forgetting  any  other  home  but  this. 

The  true  poetic  drama  is  not  the  closet-drama ;  it  is 
not  the  mere  costume-play  in  blank  verse ;  it  is  not  the 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    267 

empty  imitation  of  the  Elizabethan  formula.  It  is  a 
play  composed  in  accordance  with  the  conditions  of 
the  modern  theater,  whether  in  verse  or  in  prose  mat- 
ters little,  but  poetic  in  theme  and  poetic  in  treatment, 
as  well  as  dramatic  in  theme  and  dramatic  in  treat- 
ment. It  is  a  play  at  once  truly  poetic  and  truly  dra- 
matic, —  only  this  and  nothing  more.  It  is  not  a  play 
with  a  commonplace  subject  decked  with  fine  phrases 
and  stuccoed  with  hand-made  verses.  It  must  be 
lifted  up  into  poetry  by  the  haunting  beauty  of  its 
story,  since  it  cannot  be  made  truly  poetic  by  any 
merely  lyrical  decoration.  The  story  need  not  be 
strange  or  exotic  or  unusual ;  it  may  even  be  a  tale  of 
to-day  and  of  every  day,  one  of  the  old,  old  tales  that 
are  forever  renewing  their  youth.  Dramatic  art  has 
a  right  to  follow  the  practice  of  pictorial  art,  when,  in 
Whistler's  sincere  words,  it  was  "  seeking  and  finding 
the  beautiful  in  all  conditions  and  all  times,  as  did  her 
high  priest  Rembrandt  when  he  saw  the  picturesque 
grandeur  in  the  Jew's  quarter  of  Amsterdam,  and 
lamented  not  that  its  inhabitants  were  not  Greeks." 

The  poetic  drama  must  be  truly  dramatic  and  truly 
poetic ;  but  it  must  not  plead  its  poetry  as  an  excuse  for 
mere  foolishness,  and  it  must  not  give  us  characters 
who  are  not  governed  by  common  sense  at  the  crucial 
moments  of  the  action.  The  principle  is  laid  down  by 
Professor  Lounsbury  in  his  incisive  analysis  of  a  "  Blot 
in  the  'Scutcheon":  "The  plot  may  be  what  you 
please.  The  story  upon  which  it  is  based  may  be  so 
far  from  probable  that  it  verges  on  the  impossible.  But 
this,  while  objectionable,  can  be  pardoned.  What  is 
without  excuse  is  to  find  the  characters  acting  without 
adequate  motive ;  or,  if  the  motive  be  adequate,  to  find 


268  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

them  acting  in  the  most  incomprehensible  way  for  ra- 
tional beings."  The  keen  critic  then  pointed  out  that 
Shakspere  is  almost  always  unerring  in  his  observance 
of  this  dramatic  propriety.  "The  plot  of  his  play  may 
rest  upon  a  story  which  is  simply  incredible,  as  is  not- 
ably the  case  in  the  'Merchant  of  Venice.'  All  that 
Shakspere  asks  is  that  the  story  shall  be  one  which 
his  hearers  are  willing  to  accept  as  likely  to  happen, 
whether  in  itself  likely  or  not.  This  granted,  there  is  no 
further  demand  upon  our  trust  in  him  as  opposed  to 
our  judgment.  We  say  of  every  situation :  This  is  the 
natural  way  for  the  characters  as  here  portrayed  to 
think  and  feel  and  act.  The  motives  are  sufficient ;  the 
conduct  that  follows  is  what  we  have  a  right  to  expect." 
When  this  test  is  applied  to  Browning's  play  we  are 
told  that  "  the  characters  throughout  scrupulously  avoid 
doing  what*  they  might  reasonably  be  expected  to  do ; 
while  the  things  they  might  naturally  be  expected  to 
avoid  are  the  very  things  which  they  do  not  seem  to 
conceive  the  idea  of  refraining  from  doing.  The  play 
consequently  violates  every  motive  which  is  supposed  to 
influence  human  conduct ;  it  outrages  every  probability 
which  is  supposed  to  characterize  human  action.'*  In 
other  words,  BrowTning,  in  a  "  Blot  in  the  'Scutcheon," 
has  a  perfectly  possible  story,  which  he  has  chosen  to 
people  with  characters  arbitrarily  unnatural  in  their 
conduct,  whereas  Shakspere  in  the  "Merchant  of 
Venice"  has  an  almost  impossible  story,  carried  on  by 
characters  unfailingly  natural.  In  Browning's  play, 
"  we  are  in  a  world  of  unreal  beings,  powerfully  por- 
trayed ;  for  the  situations  are  exciting,  and  the  pathos  of 
the  piece  is  harrowing.  But  the  action  lies  out  of  the 
realm  of  the  reality  it  purports  to  represent,  and  there- 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC  POEM    269 

fore  out  of  the  realm  of  the  highest  art,"  —  that  realm 
of  the  highest  art  which  easily  includes  Shakspere's 
play  in  spite  of  the  incredibility  of  certain  of  its  episodes. 
Abundance  of  poetry,  of  power,  of  pathos  will  not 
excuse  paucity  of  common  sense  in  the  conduct  of  the 
personages  of  the  play.  No  bravura  fervor  of  phrase 
will  palliate  sheer  foolishness  of  deed.  This  defect  may 
be  more  or  less  hidden  from  us  when  we  read  the  play 
in  the  library,  but  it  stands  out  undisguised  and  naked 
when  we  see  the  story  bodied  forth  on  the  stage.  There 
is  then  no  excuse  for  any  effort  to  apologize  for  it  or  to 
gloss  it  over.  It  is  fatal,  for  the  massed  spectators  in  the 
theater  have  sharp  eyes  and  plain  tongues;  and  they 
resent  every  effort  to  make  them  admire  a  play  which 
they  find  revolting  to  their  every-day  knowledge  of 
human  nature. 

VI 

Nothing  is  more  unfortunate  for  the  future  of  the 
poetic  drama  than  the  frequent  attempts  of  superior 
persons  to  dragoon  the  ordinary  playgoer  into  the 
theater  to  behold  a  play  which  he  is  certain  not  to 
enjoy.  He  resents  being  berated  for  not  admiring  that 
which  has  annoyed  him  by  its  artificiality  or  bored  him 
by  its  clumsiness.  The  attitude  taken  by  many  merely 
literary  critics  after  a  performance  of  "Pippa  Passes'* 
or  of  the  "Sunken  Bell"  U  distinctly  harmful  to  the 
cause  they  have  at  heart.  If  these  performances  wearied 
the  average  spectator,  as  they  indisputably  did,  and  if 
he  is  scolded  because  he  has  failed  to  appreciate  these 
alleged  poetic  dramas,  he  is  very  likely  to  stay  away  the 
next  time  these  merely  literary  critics  seek  to  browbeat 
him  into  the  theater  to  see  another  poetic  drama.  Per- 


270  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

haps  it  is  just  as  well  for  us  all  to  remember  that  the 
playgoer  not  only  knows  what  he  likes,  but  also  that  he 
knows  very  definitely  what  he  does  not  like.  When  he 
goes  to  the  playhouse,  he  wants  to  see  a  play  peopled 
with  recognizable  human  beings  and  affording  him  the 
kind  of  pleasure  he  expects  in  the  theater.  He  has  no 
objection  to  poetry,  if  poetry  is  added  to  the  play.  He 
rejects  poetry  unhesitatingly,  when  he  finds  it  proffered 
as  a  substitute  for  a  play.  He  is  in  the  present  very 
much  what  he  was  in  the  past ;  the  playgoers  of  Shak- 
spere's  time  did  not  have  to  be  coerced  into  paying  to 
see  "As  You  Like  It"  and  "Hamlet";  they  went 
gladly,  for  they  had  been  told  that  they  would  get  their 
money's  worth.  The  playgoers  of  Mr.  Barrie's  time 
have  flocked  to  see  "Peter  Pan,"  a  truly  poetic  play, 
compounded  of  fantasy  and  reality. 

The  example  of  Mr.  Barrie  is  suggestive  :  he  has  suc- 
ceeded on  the  stage  because  he  has  mastered  its  mys- 
teries. We  cannot  expect  a  rebirth  of  the  poetic  drama 
until  our  poets  turn  playwrights  or  our  playwrights 
develop  into  poets.  The  poets  must  go  to  school  in  the 
theater  and  learn  the  craft  of  the  playmaker  in  his  own 
workshop,  as  Mr.  Barrie  has  done,  and  as  Victor  Hugo 
did  when  he  set  himself  to  spy  out  the  secret  of  the  suc- 
cess attained  by  the  melodramatists  of  the  unliterary 
theaters.  For  a  poet  to  compose  a  poem  in  dialogue, 
and  then  expect  that  some  adroit  stage-manager  can 
lick  it  into  shape  and  make  an  actable  play  out  of  it,  — 
this  is  very  much  as  if  he  should  ask  the  monthly  nurse 
to  put  a  backbone  into  the  baby  after  it  is  born.  A 
poetic  play  must  be  dramatic  in  its  conception,  or  it 
will  never  be  a  play  at  all.  The  fundamental  principles 
of  dramaturgy  are  not  really  difficult  to  acquire ;  and  if 


POETIC  DRAMA  AND  DRAMATIC   POEM    271 

a  poet  has  it  in  him  to  be  a  playwright,  he  ought  to  be 
able  to  get  hold  of  the  essentials  of  the  new  art  without 
a  prolonged  apprenticeship.  But  he  needs  to  feel,  first 
of  all,  that  it  is  an  art,  a  very  special  art,  closely  con- 
nected with  the  actual  theater.  If  he  begins  by  assum- 
ing an  attitude  of  haughty  disdain,  he  is  not  likely  to 
find  profit  in  his  venture. 

While  some  poets  will  choose  to  master  the  craft  of 
the  playwright,  some  playwrights  will  prove  themselves 
possessed  of  the  faculty  divine.  We  are  accustomed  to 
consider  the  great  dramatists  primarily  as  poets,  and 
we  do  not  often  look  closely  enough  into  their  careers 
to  observe  that  some  of  them  began  as  playmakers, 
pure  and  simple.  Shakspere,  for  one,  and  Moliere,  for 
another,  were  at  first  merely  professional  playwrights, 
composing  their  earliest  pieces  to  please  contemporary 
playgoers  and  revealing  in  these  earliest  pieces  scarcely 
a  foretaste  of  the  abundant  poetry  which  enriches  their 
later  and  greater  plays.  No  examination  of  the  first- 
lings of  their  muse  would  have  warranted  any  predic- 
tion of  their  extraordinary  development  in  their  riper 
years.  And  perhaps  some  of  the  professional  play- 
wrights of  the  twentieth  century  will  rise  to  loftier 
heights  as  they  grow  in  power  and  in  ambition.  They 
may  bourgeon  into  verse  when  the  fascination  of  a  truly 
poetic  theme  some  day  seizes  them.  They,  at  least,  will 
not  need  to  be  reminded  that  whenever  and  wherever 
the  poetic  drama  has  existed,  it  has  been  primarily 
dramatic  in  its  intent  and  only  secondarily  poetic. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

THE  THREE   UNITIES 

And  here  the  Reader  may  please  take  notice  that  the  Design  of 
these  Rules  is  to  conceal  the  Fiction  of  the  Stage,  to  make  the 
Play  appear  Natural,  and  to  give  it  an  air  of  Reality  and  Conver- 
sation. 

The  largest  compass  of  the  first  Unity  is  Twenty-Four  Hours: 
But  a  lesser  proportion  is  more  regular.  To  be  exact,  the  Time 
of  the  History,  or  Fable,  should  not  exceed  that  of  the  Representa- 
tion :  Or  in  other  words,  the  whole  Business  of  the  Play  should  not 
be  much  longer  than  the  Time  it  takes  up  in  Playing. 

The  Second  Unity  is  that  of  Place.  To  observe  it,  the  Scene  must 
not  wander  from  one  Town  or  Country  to  another.  It  must  continue 
in  the  same  House,  Street,  or  at  farthest  in  the  same  City,  where 
it  was  first  laid.  The  reason  of  this  Rule  depends  upon  the  First. 
Now,  the  Compass  of  Time  being  strait,  that  of  Space  must  bear  a 
correspondent  Proportion.  Long  journeys  in  Plays  are  impracticable. 
The  distances  of  Place  must  be  suited  to  Leisure  and  Possibility; 
otherwise  the  supposition  will  appear  unnatural  and  absurd. 

The  Third  Unity  is  that  of  Action.  It  consists  in  contriving  the 
chief  Business  of  the  Play  single,  and  making  the  concerns  of  one 
Person  distinguishable  great  above  the  rest.  —  JEREMY  COLLIER, 
Remarks  upon  the  Relapse. 

The  truth  is  that  the  spectators  are  always  in  their  senses,  and 
know,  from  the  first  act  to  the  last,  that  the  stage  is  only  a  stage  and 
that  the  players  are  only  players.  They  came  to  hear  a  certain  num- 
ber of  lines  recited  with  just  gesture  and  elegant  modulation.  The 
lines  relate  to  some  action,  and  an  action  must  be  in  some  place; 
but  the  different  actions  that  complete  a  story  may  be  in  places 
very  remote  from  each  other;  and  where  is  the  absurdity  of  allow- 
ing that  space  to  represent  first  Athens  and  then  Sicily,  which 
was  always  known  to  be  neither  Sicily  nor  Athens  but  a  modern 
theater? 

.  .  .  Time  is,  of  all  modes  of  existence,  the  most  obsequious  to 
the  imagination ;  a  lapse  of  years  is  as  easily  conceived  as  a  passage 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  273 

of  hours.  In  contemplation  we  easily  contract  the  time  of  real  ac- 
tions, and  therefore  willingly  permit  it  to  be  contracted  when  we  only 
see  their  imitation.  —  SAMUEL  JOHNSON,  Preface  to  Shakspere. 


IN  the  ever-delightful  pages  in  which  Dickens  de- 
scribes the  unexpected  characters  with  whom  Nicholas 
Nickleby  is  brought  in  contact  during  the  days  of  his 
association  with  the  strolling  players  under  the  man- 
agement of  Mr.  Crummies,  we  are  made  acquainted 
with  a  worthy  country  gentleman,  Mr.  Curdle,  who 
poses  as  a  patron  of  the  drama.  When  Mr.  Curdle 
is  informed  that  Nicholas  Nickleby  is  the  author  of 
the  new  play  in  which  the  Infant  Phenomenon  is  to 
appear,  he  expresses  the  hope  that  the  young  dramatist 
has  "preserved  the  unities."  He  insists  that  incident, 
dialogue,  and  characters  are  "all  unavailing  without 
a  strict  observance  of  the  unities." 

"  *  Might  I  ask  you/  said  the  hesitating  Nicholas,  '  what 
the  unities  are  ?  ' 

"Mr.  Curdle  coughed  and  considered.  *  The  unities,  sir/ 
he  said,  'are  a  completeness  —  a  kind  of  universal  dove- 
tailedness  with  regard  to  time  and  place  —  a  sort  of  general 
oneness,  if  I  may  be  allowed  to  use  so  strong  an  expression. 
I  take  those  to  be  the  dramatic  unities,  so  far  as  I  have  been 
enabled  to  bestow  attention  upon  them,  and  I  have  read 
much  upon  the  subject,  and  thought  much/  " 

Very  likely  the  creator  of  Mr.  Curdle  and  of  Mr. 
Crummies  would  have  found  it  difficult  to  give  any 
better  definition  of  the  unities  than  this  which  he  put 
in  the  mouth  of  one  of  his  comic  characters.  But  then 
Dickens  did  not  pretend  to  have  read  much  upon  the 
subject  and  thought  much.  Probably  many  a  play- 
goer who  has  heard  about  the  dramatic  unities  and 


274  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

about  the  duty  of  preserving  them,  has  no  more  exact 
idea  as  to  what  they  really  are  than  Mr.  Curdle.  In- 
deed, we  may  find  the  term  used  by  some  dramatic 
critics  of  to-day  with  a  haziness  of  meaning  recalling 
the  vagueness  of  Mr.  Curdle's  definition.  Yet  the  term 
has  a  precise  content,  known  to  those  who  have  really 
read  much  upon  the  subject  and  thought  much;  and 
the  theory  of  the  dramatic  unities  has  a  history  which 
has  been  made  clear  comparatively  recently. 

It  is  not  uncommon  to  read  references  to  the  "uni- 
ties of  Aristotle";  and  yet  Aristotle  knew  them  not 
and  did  not  discuss  them  at  all.  It  has  happened  of 
late  that  they  have  been  termed  the  "unities  of  Scali- 
ger";  and  yet  they  were  not  completely  declared  by 
Scaliger.  They  are  to  be  found  formulated  with  the 
utmost  sharpness  in  Boileau's  "Art  of  Poetry";  but 
they  were  familiar  to  Sidney  when  he  penned  his  "  De- 
fense of  Poesy."  Jonson  tried  to  preserve  them;  but 
Shakspere  refused  to  let  them  shackle  him.  Lope  de 
Vega  admitted  their  validity  and  yet  evaded  their  rule, 
as  he  regretfully  confessed.  Corneille  had  never  heard 
of  them  when  he  wrote  his  fieriest  play ;  and  they  were 
at  the  bottom  of  the  famous  "Quarrel  of  the  Cid," 
in  which  Richelieu  involved  the  French  Academy  he 
had  recently  established.  Lessing  analyzed  them  un- 
favorably in  the  eighteenth  century ;  and  in  the  nine- 
teenth, Victor  Hugo  derided  them  in  his  flamboyant 
preface  to  "  Cromwell, "  wherein  he  raised  the  red  flag 
of  the  romanticist  revolt.  And  yet  the  dramatic  uni- 
ties are  preserved  once  more  in  the  "Francillon"  of 
the  younger  Dumas,  son  of  Hugo's  early  rival,  and 
in  the  "Ghosts"  of  Ibsen,  the  austere  Norwegian 
realist,  —  although  in  all  probability  neither  of  these 


THE   THREE  UNITIES  275 

latter-day  dramatists  had  paid  any  attention  to  the  the- 
ory which  insisted  that  the  unities  must  be  preserved. 

What  are  then  these  unities  which  some  dramatic 
poets  believe  in,  but  reject,  and  which  others  preserve 
without  taking  thought?  What  are  they,  and  where 
do  they  come  from  ?  Why  should  anybody  want  to 
preserve  them  ?  How  could  anybody  achieve  this  pre- 
servation without  effort  ?  To  find  the  answer  to  these 
queries,  we  must  be  willing  to  go  on  a  loitering  excur- 
sion through  literature  after  literature,  straying  from 
French  into  Italian  and  then  wandering  back  into  Greek 
before  strolling  forward  again  into  English,  —  an  excur- 
sion which  will  force  us  to  fellowship  with  Boileau  and 
Aristotle,  with  Shakspere  and  Ben  Jon  son,  as  well  as 
with  the  ingenious  critics  of  the  Italian  Renascence  and 
with  the  ardent  playwrights  of  French  romanticism. 

The  clearest  and  most  succinct  declaration  of  the 
dramatic  unities  was  made  by  Boileau  when  he  laid 
down  the  law  that  a  tragedy  must  show  "one  action 
in  one  day  and  in  one  place."  It  must  deal  with  only 
a  single  story ;  and  this  obligation  is  the  Unity  of  Action. 
It  must  never  change  the  scene,  massing  its  episodes 
in  a  single  locality;  and  this  is  the  Unity  of  Place. 
And  it  must  compress  its  successive  situations  into  the 
space  of  twenty-four  hours,  into  a  single  day;  and  this 
is  the  Unity  of  Time.  When  a  tragedy  presents  a 
simple  and  straightforward  story  without  change  of 
scenery  and  without  any  longer  lapse  of  time  than  a 
single  revolution  of  the  sun,  then  and  only  then  are 
the  three  unities  preserved,  as  Boileau  understood 
them.  And  in  thus  laying  down  the  law  which  must 
bind  the  tragic  poet,  the  French  critic  believed  that 
he  was  only  echoing  the  regulations  promulgated  by 


276  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

Aristotle,  the  great  Greek,  whose  authority  then  over- 
awed critics  and  poets  alike.  Yet  Boileau  would  have 
held  with  the  Abbe  d  'Aubignac,  his  predecessor  as  a 
critic,  and  with  Corneille,  his  contemporary  as  a  poet, 
that  the  strict  observation  of  the  three  unities  is  de- 
manded not  only  by  authority  but  by  reason  also. 
Two  and  three  hundred  years  ago,  all  men  of  letters 
seem  to  have  agreed  that  even  if  the  ancients  had  not 
prescribed  these  limitations,  they  would  have  been 
evolved  by  the  moderns  independently,  as  a  result  of  the 
strenuous  search  for  the  perfect  form  of  the  ideal  play. 

It  was  lucky  for  the  theory  of  the  three  unities  that 
its  advocates  sought  to  prop  it  up  by  this  appeal  to  rea- 
son, since  it  was  not  actually  supported  by  the  author- 
ity of  Aristotle.  Although  they  were  long  called  the 
Aristotelian  Unities,  only  one  of  the  three  is  formally 
set  forth  by  the  Greek  philosopher,  even  if  a  second 
has  been  implied  from  one  of  his  statements.  Boileau 
and  his  contemporaries,  like  their  Italian  predecessors, 
made  the  natural  mistake  of  thinking  of  Aristotle  as 
a  theorist,  like  unto  themselves,  as  engaged  in  work- 
ing out  an  ideal  system  for  the  drama.  But  this  was 
just  what  Aristotle  was  not.  Whether  he  was  consider- 
ing the  constitution  of  Athens  or  the  construction  of 
the  Attic  drama,  the  Greek  inquirer  was  unfailingly 
practical.  He  dealt  with  the  thing  as  he  saw  it  before 
his  eyes,  taking  it  as  he  found  it,  relishing  the  concrete 
and  eschewing  the  abstract. 

Aristotle's  attitude  is  the  same  as  Lessing's  in  the 
eighteenth  century  and  Sarcey's  in  the  nineteenth. 
He  did  not  retire  within  himself  and  weave  theories 
out  of  thin  air.  He  was  no  closet-critic  of  a  closet-drama. 
He  sat  himself  down  in  the  theater  itself  to  see  plays 


THE  THRIVE   UNITIES  277 

performed  by  actors  before  an  audience,  and  the  prin- 
ciples he  lays  down  are  the  logical  deduction  from  his 
observation  of  the  effect  produced  on  him  by  the  actual 
performance  of  the  particular  kind  of  tragic  drama  he 
is  analyzing.  He  is  no  spinner  of  theories  in  a  vacuum; 
and  he  kept  himself  in  close  contact  with  the  realities 
of  the  theater.  He  came  early  in  the  development  of 
the  drama;  and  the  plays  of  the  Greeks  were  all  that 
he  knew.  With  his  marvelous  acuteness  of  insight,  he 
mastered  the  mechanism  of  Attic  tragedy ;  he  discovered 
the  principles  which  had  governed  its  makers  and  ac- 
cording to  which  they  had  worked,  —  more  or  less 
unconsciously,  as  is  the  wont  of  artists.  If  Aristotle  had 
known  any  other  type  of  drama  than  that  of  the  Greeks, 
he  would  have  had  standards  of  comparison;  and  his 
deductions  would  have  been  different.  As  it  was,  he 
handled  the  matter  before  him  with  incomparable 
certainty.  Even  though  he  was  acquainted  with  only 
one  form  of  tragedy,  he  pierced  to  the  center  and  said 
many  things  which  are  applicable  to  every  form  of 
tragedy,  ancient  and  modern.  It  is  true  that  he  also 
said  many  things  which  are  applicable  only  to  the 
tragic  drama  of  the  Athenians. 

ii 

Of  the  three  unities,  only  one  is  to  be  found^formally 
stated  in  Aristotle's  treatise.  This  is  the  Unity  of  Ac- 
tion ;  and  it  is  as  valid  in  the  modern  drama  as  in  the 
ancient.  The  Greek  critic  declared  that  a  tragedy  ought 
to  have  a  single  subject,  whole  and  complete  in  itself, 
with  a  beginning,  a  middle,  and  an  end.  This  is  true 
of  every  work  of  art,  tragic  or  epic,  pictorial  or  plastic. 
Every  work  of  art  ought  to  leave  a  direct  and  simple 


278  A  STUDY  OF^THE  DRAMA 

impression,  which  it  cannot  make  without  a  concen- 
tration upon  its  theme  and  without  a  rigorous  exclu- 
sion of  all  non-essentials.  It  is  true  that  there  are  great 
works  of  literary  art,  in  which  we  perceive  two  stories 
intertwined  and  demanding  equal  attention,  —  the 
"Merchant  of  Venice,"  for  example,  and  "Vanity 
Fair"  and  "Anna  Karenina."  But  they  are  great  in 
spite  of  this  bifurcation  of  interest;  and  they  number 
very  few  among  the  masterpieces  of  literature.  In 
most  of  these  masterpieces,  we  find  only  a  single  theme, 
as  in  the  "(Edipus"  of  Sophocles  and  in  the  "Tartuffe" 
of  Moliere;  in  the  "Scarlet  Letter"  of  Hawthorne  and 
in  the  "Smoke"  of  Turgenieff. 

Shakspere  is  often  careless  in  the  construction  of  the 
plots  of  his  romantic-comedies  and  of  his  dramatic- 
romances,  "Much  Ado  about  Nothing,"  for  example, 
and  the  "Winter's  Tale";  but  he  is  very  careful  to 
give  essential  unity  to  the  loftier  tragedies  in  which 
he  put  forth  his  full  strength,  in  "Othello,"  and 
"Hamlet,"  and  "Macbeth."  In  these  supreme  efforts 
of  his  tragic  power,  he  achieves  not  only  the  needful 
unity  of  plot,  but  also  the  subtler  unity  of  tone,  of  color, 
of  sentiment.  With  his  customary  acuteness,  Coleridge 
dwelt  on  the  "unity  of  feeling"  which  Shakspere  ob- 
serves. 

"  Read  ^  Romeo  and  Juliet,' "  he  declared ;  —  "  all  is  youth 
and  spring;  youth  with  all  its  follies,  its  virtues,  its  precipi- 
tancies ;  —  spring  with  its  odors,  its  flowers,  and  its  tran- 
siency ;  it  is  one  and  the  same  feeling  that  commences,  goes 
through,  and  ends  the  play.  The  old  men,  the  Capulets  and 
the  Montagues,  are  not  common  old  men ;  they  have  an  eager- 
ness, a  heartiness,  a  vehemence,  the  effect  of  spring;  with 
Romeo,  his  change  of  passion,  his  sudden  marriage,  and  his 
rash  death,  are  all  the  effects  of  youth ;  —  whilst  in  Juliet, 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  279 

love  has  all  that  is  tender  and  voluptuous  in  the  rose,  with 
whatever  is  sweet  in  the  freshness  of  spring;  but  it  ends  with 
a  long  deep  sigh  like  the  last  breeze  of  the  Italian  evening." 

In  asserting  the  necessity  of  the  Unity  of  Action, 
the  only  unity  which  is  to  be  found  plainly  set  forth 
in  his  fragmentary  treatise,  Aristotle  was  anticipating 
the  demand  of  Mr.  Curdle  that  the  dramatist  should 
give  to  his  work  "  a  completeness,  —  a  kind  of  universal 
dovetailedness,  a  sort  of  general  oneness."  Apparently, 
the  Unity  of  Action  was  the  only  one  of  the  three  uni- 
ties that  Mr.  Curdle  knew  anything  about,  even  though 
he  had  read  much  upon  the  subject  and  thought  much. 
And  it  is  the  only  one  which  has  imposed  itself  upon 
all  the  greater  dramatists,  whether  Greek  or  English, 
French  or  Scandinavian.  It  is  the  only  one  of  the 
three  which  is  now  accepted  as  imperative  beyond  all 
question;  and  it  is  the  only  one  the  acceptance  of 
which  by  the  dramatic  poet  is  everywhere  to  his  abiding 
advantage. 

Thus  we  see  that  Boileau  was  justified  in  demanding 
that  tragic  poets  should  deal  only  with  a  single  theme. 
Was  he  right  also  in  insisting  that  they  should  limit 
the  action  to  a  single  day  and  to  a  single  place  ?  And 
what  was  his  warrant  for  believing  that  they  should 
impose  these  limitations  on  their  freedom  ?  His  justi- 
fication was  twofold,  the  appeal  to  reason  and  the 
appeal  to  authority,  —  to  what  had  been  read  into 
Aristotle's  treatise  although  it  had  not  been  explicitly 
expressed  therein.  Yet  there  is  possibly  some  slight 
foundation  for  the  belief  that  Aristotle  had  declared 
the  Unity  of  Time,  as  well  as  the  Unity  of  Action.  The 
Greek  drama  was  acted  outdoors  in  the  level  orchestra 
of  the  theater ;  and  the  single  story  of  the  play  was  un- 


280  A  STUDY   OF  THE  DRAMA 

rolled  before  the  audience  without  any  such  intermis- 
sions as  our  modern  interacts.  The  Greek  playwright 
was  therefore  under  strong  pressure  to  relate  his  suc- 
cessive episodes  as  closely  as  he  could,  to  avoid  distract- 
ing the  attention  of  the  spectators  from  his  plot  to  the 
mere  lapse  of  time.  Therefore  he  tended  to  avoid  all 
mention  of  time  and  to  present  his  situations  as  follow- 
ing swiftly  one  after  the  other. 

"Tragedy  endeavors,"  so  Aristotle  tells  us,  "so  far 
as  possible,  to  confine  itself  to  a  single  revolution  of  the 
sun,  or  but  slightly  to  exceed  this  limit."  But  the  great 
critic  is  not  here  laying  down  the  law;  he  is  merely  de- 
claring the  habitual  practice  of  the  playwrights  whose 
works  he  was  studying,  to  spy  out  their  secrets.  He  is 
not  asserting  that  this  must  be  done ;  he  is  only  inform- 
ing us  that  it  was  done  as  far  aS  possible.  He  could  not 
help  knowing  that  it  was  not  always  possible,  and,  that 
when  it  was  not  possible,  the  Greek  dramatists  did  not 
hesitate  to  extend  their  plot  over  as  long  a  period  as 
they  might  think  necessary.  For  example,  the  "Aga- 
memnon" of  JEschylus  begins  with  the  Watchman 
on  the  tower  looking  for  the  flaming  signal  which  was 
to  announce  the  fall  of  Troy,  flashing  from  beacon  to 
beacon,  from  hilltop  to  hilltop  across  leagues  of  land  and 
sea.  At  last  the  Watchman  catches  sight  of  the  blaze, 
and  he  descends  to  tell  Clytemnestra  that  her  husband 
is  that  day  set  free  to  depart  on  his  long  voyage  home- 
ward. It  would  be  many  more  days  before  the  hero 
could  be  expected  to  arrive;  and  yet  in  the  middle  of 
the  play,  Agamemnon  appears  and  enters  the  palace 
to  meet  his  death.  Here  is  a  long  lapse  of  time,  fore- 
shortened by  the  dramatist,  because  it  was  not  pos- 
sible otherwise  to  deal  advantageously  with  the  story. 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  281 

It  may  be  admitted  that  the  "Agamemnon"  is  the 
only  extant  Greek  play  which  covers  so  protracted  a 
period.  But  that  ^Eschylus  should  have  ventured  to 
do  this  is  evidence  that  the  Greeks  themselves  had  ac- 
cepted no  hard-and-fast  rule  compelling  them  to  limit 
the  duration  of  the  story  to  twenty-four  hours.  Now, 
if  the  Unity  of  Time  was  not  always  observed  by  the 
Greek  dramatic  poets  and  if  it  was  not  formally  pre- 
scribed by  Aristotle,  how  did  it  come  into  being  ?  And 
thanks  to  Professor  Spingarn's  illuminating  investiga- 
tion into  Italian  criticism  during  the  Renascence,  this 
question  is  now  easy  to  answer.  Giraldi  Cinthio,  — 
from  one  of  whose  tales  Shakspere  was  to  derive  the 
suggestion  for  his  "Othello,"  —  wrote  a  "Discourse  on 
Comedy  and  Tragedy,"  in  which  he  limited  the  time 
of  a  play  to  a  single  day,  thus  converting  Aristotle's 
statement  of  a  historical  fact  into  a  dramatic  law,  and 
changing  Aristotle's  "single  revolution  of  the  sun" 
into  a  "  single  day."  A  little  later,  another  Italian  critic, 
Robortello,  cut  down  the  time  to  twelve  hours,  "  for 
as  tragedy  can  contain  only  one  single  and  continuous 
action,  and  as  people  are  accustomed  to  sleep  in  the 
night,  it  follows  that  the  tragic  action  cannot  be  con- 
tinued beyond  one  artificial  day."  And  a  little  later, 
still  yet  another  Italian,  Trissino,  declared  that  the 
Unity  of  Time  is  imperative  on  all  playwrights,  though 
it  is  disobeyed  "even  to-day  by  ignorant  poets." 

This  final  sneer  is  very  significant.  In  the  Italian 
Renascence,  all  literature  —  and  criticism  more  espe- 
cially —  was  frankly  aristocratic.  It  made  its  appeal 
not  to  the  many,  but  to  the  few;  it  was  not  for  the 
plain  people,  but  only  for  the  cultivated,  who  were 
alone  capable  of  understanding  the  artist.  This  at- 


282  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

titude  is  not  dead  in  America  to-day ;  it  was  univer- 
sal in  Italy  four  centuries  ago.  The  educated  classes 
had  come  into  the  splendid  heritage  of  the  classics; 
and  they  felt  themselves  more  than  ever  elevated  above 
the  common  herd.  What  the  common  herd  could 
enjoy  was  by  that  very  fact  discredited.  The  men  of 
letters  kept  aloof  from  the  vulgar  throng;  they  were 
artists  working  for  the  appreciation  of  their  fellow 
dilettants.  To  take  this  attitude  is  ever  dangerous  even 
for  the  lyric  poet;  for  the  dramatist  it  is  fatal.  The 
drama  is  of  necessity  the  most  democratic  of  the  arts, 
making  its  appeal  to  the  people  as  a  whole,  educated 
and  uneducated  alike.  But  the  Italian  critics  despised 
the  popular  acted  drama  of  their  own  day;  and  they 
deemed  it  wholly  unworthy  of  consideration.  How- 
ever much  they  as  individuals  might  enjoy  the  rollicking 
comedy-of-masks  or  the  more  primitive  miracle-plays, 
they  as  a  class  despised  this  unpretending  folk-drama. 
So  Sidney,  who  had  been  nurtured  on  Italian  criticism, 
despised  the  popular  drama  which  was  the  connecting 
link  between  the  rude  medieval  mystery  and  the  noble 
Elizabethan  tragedy. 

Here,  indeed,  is  the  difference  between  Aristotle 
and  his  Italian  commentators.  He  was  a  regular  play- 
goer ;  and  the  principles  he  sets  forth  are  only  the  re- 
sults of  his  study  of  a  great  dramatic  literature,  as  this 
was  vividly  revealed  in  the  actual  theater.  They  had 
never  seen  a  good  play  well  acted.  What  they  had  be- 
held on  the  stage  was  not  good,  according  to  their  stand- 
ards; and  what  they  esteemed  good  they  could  not 
behold  on  any  stage.  This  explains  their  academic 
theorizing,  their  pedantry,  their  insistence  upon  con- 
formity with  arbitrary  limitations.  While  Aristotle, 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  283 

with  the  hard-headed  common  sense  of  the  Greek,  had 
his  eye  fixed  on  the  concrete  as  he  saw  it,  they,  with 
the  super-ingenious  subtlety  of  the  Italian,  bent  their 
gaze  on  the  abstract.  They  longed  for  a  noble  dra- 
matic literature  and  they  tried  to  make  it  out  of  hand 
by  servile  imitation  of  Latin  tragedy  and  Latin  comedy. 
They  did  not  guess  that  the  folk-plays  enjoyed  by  the 
vulgar  throng  needed  only  to  be  improved,  to  supply 
a  foundation  for  a  living  drama  at  once  poetic  and 
popular.  Their  aristocratic  contempt  for  the  common 
herd  prevented  the  Italians  from  developing  out  of 
their  own  folk-drama  a  type  of  play  dignified  and 
national,  such  as  the  English,  the  Spanish,  and  the 
French  were  to  develop.  The  sacred-representations, 
medieval  as  they  might  be,  had  in  them  the  germ  of 
lofty  tragedy;  and  the  comedy-of -masks  might  have 
been  purged  of  its  grossness  and  lifted  into  literature 
(and  this  is  exactly  what  Moliere  was  to  do  more  than 
a  century  later).  Because  they  scorned  the  acted 
drama  of  their  own  day,  meager  as  it  might  be  and 
barren  of  art,  the  clever  Italians  deprived  themselves 
of  a  living  dramatic  literature.  In  its  stead,  they  had 
only  a  code  of  laws,  arbitrarily  declaring  what  a  dra- 
matic literature  ought  to  be. 

The  Unity  of  Action  was  proclaimed  by  Aristotle; 
the  Unity  of  Time  was  elaborated  into  a  rule  from  one 
of  Aristotle's  casual  statements  of  fact ;  and  the  Unity 
of  Place  was  deduced  by  the  Italian  critics  from  the 
Unity  of  Time,  as  Professor  Spingarn  has  made  plain. 
Almost  suggested  by  Scaliger,  it  was  actually  formu- 
lated first  by  Castelvetro,  who  differed  from  his  con- 
temporaries in  that  he  took  account  of  the  desires 
of  a  possible  audience.  It  is  true  that  Castelvetro,  in 


284  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

spite  of  his  talk  about  the  actual  stage,  knew  quite  as 
little  about  it  as  any  of  his  contemporaries.  Yet  he 
declared  it  to  be  the  duty  of  the  dramatist  to  please  the 
spectators,  of  whatever  sort,  and  to  consult  always 
their  capabilities.  He  had  no  high  opinion  of  the  intel- 
ligence of  these  spectators,  believing  that  they  could 
not  imagine  a  lapse  of  time  or  a  change  of  scene.  At 
least,  he  suggested  that  they  would  be  annoyed  if  the 
action  was  not  confined  to  one  day  and  contained  in 
one  place. 

The  fallacy  underlying  Castelvetro's  theory  is  the 
result  of  his  assumption  that  the  spectators,  while  sit- 
ting in  their  seats,  suppose  themselves  to  be  witnessing 
reality.  He  fails  wholly  to  appreciate  the  willingness 
of  an  audience  to  "  make  believe"  almost  to  any  extent. 
And  his  own  logic  breaks  down  when  he  convinces  him- 
self that  the  spectators  cannot  imagine  two  or  three 
places  in  turn,  just  as  well  as  one  at  a  time,  and  that 
they  are  not  ready  to  let  the  author  pack  into  the  two 
hours'  traffic  of  the  stage  the  events,  not  of  twenty-four 
hours  only,  but  of  twelve  months  or  more.  He  does  not 
grasp  the  conventions  which  must  underlie  every  art 
and  which  alone  make  an  art  possible.  Every  artist 
must  be  allowed  to  depart  frankly  from  the  merely 
actual,  if  he  is  to  please  us  by  his  representation  of  life 
as  he  apprehends  it. 

Probably  the  Unity  of  Place  would  not  have  taken 
its  position  by  the  side  of  the  Unity  of  Time  and  the 
Unity  of  Action,  if  it  had  not  seemed  to  be  supported 
by  the  practice  of  the  Greek  dramatic  poets.  In  the 
surviving  specimens  of  Attic  drama,  there  are  a  few 
instances  where  the  action  is  apparently  transported 
from  one  spot  to  another ;  but  in  the  immense  majority 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  285 

of  the  Athenian  plays  which  have  come  down  to  us,  we 
note  that  the  story  begins  and  ends  in  the  same  place. 
And  the  reason  for  this  is  not  far  to  seek.  The  Greek 
drama  had  been  evolved  out  of  the  lyrics  of  the  chorus ; 
and  to  the  end  of  the  Athenian  period,  the  chorus  con- 
tinued to  be  a  most  important  element  of  a  tragic  per- 
formance. When  the  chorus  had  once  circled  into  the 
orchestra,  it  generally  remained  there  until  the  end  of 
the  tragedy.  Now,  this  presence  of  the  chorus  before 
the  eyes  of  the  spectators  prevented  the  dramatist  from 
shifting  the  location  of  his  action  even  if  he  had  desired 
to  do  so.  He  could  ask  his  audience  to  imagine  a  change 
of  place  only  when  the  orchestra  was  empty,  which 
was  very  rarely  the  case.  Furthermore,  we  must  keep 
in  mind  the  fact  that  the  theater  at  Athens  was  in  all 
probability  devoid  of  scenery,  and  that  therefore  there 
was  no  way  of  visibly  indicating  a  change  of  place. 

in 

This,  then,  is  the  theory  of  the  three  unities,  long 
credited  to  the  great  Greek  critic,  but  now  seen  to  have 
been  worked  out  by  the  supersubtle  Italian  critics  of 
the  Renascence.  Indeed,  there  is  little  exaggeration 
in  saying  that  they  evolved  it  from  their  inner  con- 
sciousness. From  Cinthio  and  Scaliger,  Castelvetro 
and  Minturno,  the  theory  passed  to  Sidney  and  Ben 
Jonson  in  England,  to  Juan  de  la  Cueva  and  Lope  de 
Vega  in  Spain,  to  the  Abbe  d'Aubignac  and  Boileau 
in  France.  For  two  centuries  and  more,  this  law  of 
the  three  unities,  with  the  other  rules  elaborated  at  the 
same  time  by  the  same  Italians,  were  accepted  through- 
out Europe  by  almost  every  critic  of  the  drama.  There 
was  an  established  standard  of  "regularity"  and  "cor- 


286  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

rectness,"  which  imposed  on  all  playwrights  a  strict 
obedience  to  the  critical  code.  This  body  of  laws  was 
supposed  to  be  supported  by  the  inexpugnable  author- 
ity of  Aristotle;  but  it  was  also  believed  to  have  its 
basis  in  reason.  It  dominated  the  drama  of  France 
until  early  in  the  nineteenth  century;  and  even  if  Cor- 
neille  now  and  again  chafed  under  it,  Voltaire  was  in- 
sistent in  supporting  it.  Dr.  Johnson  suggested  that 
if  "  Othello  "  had  opened  in  Cyprus  and  the  preceding 
incidents  been  occasionally  stated,  "there  had  been 
little  wanting  to  a  drama  of  the  most  exact  and  scru- 
pulous regularity."  Yet  this  theory  was  not  obeyed 
by  the  popular  playwrights  of  Spain,  not  even  by  Lope, 
who  was  frank  in  declaring  that  he  knew  better  than 
he  practised;  and  it  was  rejected  by  the  Elizabethan 
dramatists  in  England,  excepting  only  Ben  Jonson. 

And  this  raises  two  interesting  questions.  If  the 
code  of  correctness,  including  the  rule  calling  for  the 
preservation  of  the  three  unities,  was  accepted  by  all 
those  who  discussed  the  art  of  the  drama,  why  did  the 
practical  playwrights  of  England  and  of  Spain  refuse 
to  be  bound  by  its  behests  ?  And  why  did  the  practical 
playwrights  of  France  submit  to  be  cribbed,  cabined, 
and  confined  by  its  restrictions?  The  most  obvious 
explanation  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  the  great 
expansion  of  the  drama  arrived  in  France  at  least  half 
a  century  later  than  it  had  in  Spain  and  in  England. 
A  really  literary  drama,  rich  in  poetry  and  vigorous  in 
character,  had  been  developed  out  of  the  popular 
medieval  folk-play  far  earlier  in  Spain  and  in  England 
than  it  had  in  France;  and  the  Spanish  and  the  Eng- 
lish playwrights,  having  succeeded  in  pleasing  the  play- 
going  public  with  a  large,  bold,  and  free  drama,  saw 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  287 

no  good  reason  why  they  should  surrender  their  liber- 
ties and  risk  their  popularity  by  conforming  to  a  stand- 
ard of  correctness  which  might  gratify  the  cultivated 
few,  but  which  would  deprive  the  uneducated  many 
of  the  variety  the  main  body  of  spectators  had  been 
accustomed  to  expect  in  the  theater.  Indeed,  this  is 
the  excuse  which  Lope  de  Vega  makes  for  himself  in 
his  significant  address  on  the  "  New  Art  of  Making 
Plays." 

While  this  may  have  been  the  main  motive  of  the 
chief  of  the  Spanish  playwrights,  there  is  no  difficulty 
in  surmising  that  the  chief  of  the  English  dramatic 
poets  had  a  better  reason  for  rejecting  the  law  of  the 
three  unities  and  for  refusing  to  submit  himself  to  its 
chains.  Shakspere  was  preeminently  a  practical  man, 
with  a  keen  eye  to  the  main  chance.  He  could  find  no 
profit  in  foregoing  any  part  of  the  freedom  which  had 
enabled  him  to  catch  the  favor  of  the  playgoers  who 
welcomed  his  "native  wood-notes  wild."  And  he  could 
not  help  fearing  an  obvious  and  immediate  loss  if  he 
should  choose  to  let  himself  be  governed  by  the  Unity 
of  Time.  No  small  part  of  Shakspere's  incomparable 
power  as  a  dramatist  is  due  to  his  understanding  of  the 
forces  which  modify  character,  transforming  it  under 
pressure,  or  disintegrating  it  under  stress  of  recurring 
temptation.  Now,  character  is  not  modified  in  the 
twinkling  of  an  eye,  nor  can  it  disintegrate  in  twenty- 
four  hours.  If  Shakspere  had  chosen  to  preserve  the 
Unity  of  Time,  he  would  have  been  cotopelled  to  sup- 
press all  the  earlier  episodes  of  "Julius  Caesar,"  for 
example,  which  are  so  significant  and  which  revive  in 
our  memories  when  we  are  witnesses  of  the  later  quar- 
rel of  Brutus  and  Cassius;  and  he  would  have  had 


288  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

to  present  Macbeth  only  in  the  final  stage  of  his  moral 
deliquescence,  without  showing  us  the  manly  soldier 
before  the  virus  of  mean  ambition  had  poisoned  his 
nobler  nature. 

This  concentration  of  action  into  the  culminating 
moments  of  the  story  was  not  a  disadvantage  to  the 
Greek  dramatic  poets,  since  they  were  expected  to 
present  a  trilogy,  three  separate  plays  acted  in  swift 
succession  on  the  same  day  to  the  same   audience, 
whereby  they  were  enabled  to  show  the  tragic  hero  at 
three  different  moments  of  his  career.   But  the  obliga- 
tion to  preserve  the  Unity  of  Time  was  a  sad  restriction 
upon  the  French  dramatic  poets,  who  had  not   the 
privilege  of  the  trilogy  and  who  were  compelled  always 
to  present  characters  fixed  and  unchanging.    By  his 
compulsory  obedience  to  this  rule,  Corneille  was  robbed 
of  not  a  little  of  his  possible  range  and  sweep,  even  if 
Racine,  with  his  subtlety  of  psychologic  analysis,  may 
even  have  gained  by  an  enforced  compacting  of  his 
story  and  by  a  limitation  to  its  culminating  moments. 
Shakspere  did  not  care  to  discuss  the  principles  of 
his  craft,  as  Ben  Jonson  was  wont  to  do.  He  digresses 
in  "Hamlet"  into  a  disquisition  on  the  art  of  acting; 
but  he  nowhere  expresses  his  personal  opinions  on  the 
art  of  playwriting.    He  was  no  more  a  theatrical  re- 
former than  he  was  a  dramatic  theorist.  He  was  con- 
tent to  take  the  stage  as  he  found  it  and  to  utilize  all 
its  conventions  and  all  its  contemporary  traditions. 
If  he  declined  to  listen  to  the  precepts  of  the  critics, 
and  if  he  refused  to  preserve  the  unities,  he  had  his 
own  reasons ;  and  we  can  see  that  they  were  sufficient. 
But  it  is  unimaginable  that  he  did  not  know  what  he 
was  doing  or  that  he  was  ignorant  of  these  theories. 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  289 

It  is  very  improbable  that  he  had  not  in  his  youth 
read  Sidney's  "Defense,"  in  which  the  rule  of  the  three 
unities  is  stated  for  the  first  time  in  English.  It  is  most 
unlikely  that  in  his  maturity,  and  when  he  and  Ben 
Jonson  were  engaging  in  their  wit-combats  at  the  Mer- 
maid, he  had  not  had  occasion  to  hear  the  whole  code 
of  the  drama  proclaimed  again  and  again  by  his  robust 
and  scholarly  friend. 

We  have  seen  that  an  Italian  critic  dismissed  the 
playwrights  who  failed  to  preserve  the  unities  as  "  igno- 
rant poets."  Probably  the  reproach  of  ignorance  of  the 
rules  was  one  that  Shakspere  would  bear  with  perfect 
equanimity.  Yet,  although  he  himself  drew  no  atten- 
tion to  it,  and,  for  all  we  know,  may  not  even  have 
bidden  Jonson  to  remark  it,  he  was  moved  once,  in  the 
later  years  of  his  labors  in  London,  to  preserve  the 
unities,  as  if  to  show  that  it  was  not  ignorance,  but  a 
wise  choice,  which  had  led  him  to  reject  them  in  all 
his  other  plays,  tragic  and  comic.  The  "Tempest"  is 
in  all  likelihood  the  last  play  which  Shakspere  wrote 
without  collaboration,  and  in  the  "Tempest,"  he  chose 
to  preserve  the  unities,  —  as  they  were  then  under- 
stood in  England  and  as  they  had  been  preserved 
by  Jonson  in  several  comedies.  The  Unity  of  Place 
required  that  the  action  should  be  confined  to  a  single 
place,  but  place  was  interpreted  liberally.  A  single 
place  meant  one  palace  or  one  town,  not  necessarily 
a  specific  room  in  this  palace  or  a  specific  house  in  this 
town.  It  meant  a  single  locality,  but  not  a  single  spot. 
The  action  of  "Every  Man  in  his  Humor"  passes  in 
London,  which  is  a  single  locality,  but  it  is  not  re- 
stricted to  a  single  room  or  even  to  a  single  house  in 
that  city. 


290  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

The  "Tempest"  sets  before  us,  as  Professor  Louns- 
bury  has  pointed  out,  a  single  story,  direct  and  swift 
and  uncomplicated;  and  therefore  it  preserves  the 
Unity  of  Action.  It  is  compact  within  a  single  revo- 
lution of  the  sun,  as  the  author  takes  care  to  tell  us 
more  than  once,  —  and  therefore  it  preserves  the  Unity 
of  Time ;  indeed,  its  story  is  compressed  within  three 
hours,  not  exceeding  the  limit  of  the  performance  itself. 
It  has  for  its  locality  an  island  with  the  wrater  imme- 
diately surrounding  that  island;  and  therefore  it  pre- 
serves the  Unity  of  Place  (as  that  was  then  liberally 
interpreted).  As  we  study  the  "Tempest,"  it  is  as 
though  we  could  hear  its  author  saying  that  he  could 
play  the  game  as  well  as  any  one  else  when  he  chose, 
and  if  he  had  not  played  it  before,  this  was  simply 
because  he  did  not  deem  it  worth  the  candle. 

IV 

That  Shakspere  wrote  the  "Tempest"  is  pretty 
plain  evidence  that  he  knew  the  "rules  of  the 
drama"  quite  as  well  as  Lope  de  Vega  did.  That 
both  the  English  and  the  Spanish  dramatic  poets  re- 
fused to  abide  by  them  is  equally  evident.  And  this 
brings  up  again  the  question  why  the  doctrine  of  the 
unities  should  have  been  accepted  willingly  by  the 
professional  playwrights  of  France  after  it  had  been 
rejected  by  the  professional  playwrights  of  England 
and  of  Spain.  One  answer  to  this  query  has  already 
been  suggested  —  that  the  outflowering  of  dramatic 
poetry  was  later  in  France  than  in  England  or  in  Spain, 
and  therefore  after  the  doctrine  of  the  three  unities 
had  hardened  into  a  dogma.  Another  answer  might 
be  that  the  French  are  the  inheritors  of  the  Latin 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  291 

tradition,  that  they  like  to  do  things  decently  and  in 
order,  and  that  they  relish  restraint  more  than  the 
English  or  the  Spaniards.  We  might  go  further  and 
say  that  the  French  are  naturally  the  most  artistic  of 
the  three  races  and  that,  to  an  artist,  there  is  always  a 
keen  joy  in  working  under  bonds  and  in  grappling 
with  self-imposed  obligations.  But  there  is  a  third 
explanation  of  the  apparent  anomaly  which  comes 
nearest  to  being  adequate. 

The  drama  of  every  modern  literature  is  the  out- 
growth of  the  drama  of  the  Middle  Ages,  —  of  the 
passion-play  and  of  the  popular  farce.  But  the  de- 
velopment from  this  unliterary  folk-drama  into  true 
tragedy  and  true  comedy  is  different  in  the  different 
countries,  and  it  is  only  by  tracing  back  this  evolution 
in  France  that  we  can  lay  hold  of  the  chief  reason  why 
the  Unity  of  Place  was  accepted  in  France,  even  though 
it  had  been  rejected  in  England,  where  the  theater  had 
followed  a  slightly  different  line  of  development. 

The  full-grown  passion-play  was  the  result  of  put- 
ting together  the  several  episodes  of  the  gospel-story, 
which  had  been  shown  in  action  in  the  church  on 
different  days,  more  especially  Christmas  and  Easter, 
as  an  accompaniment  of  the  service.  Each  of  these 
episodes  had  been  set  forth  in  the  most  appropriate 
part  of  the  edifice,  —  the  Holy  Child  in  the  manger, 
on  the  chancel-steps,  the  Raising  of  Lazarus,  near  the 
crypt,  the  Crucifixion,  near  the  altar.  These  scattered 
places  where  the  separate  parts  of  the  sacred  story 
were  represented  in  action  and  in  dialogue  were  known 
as  "  stations,'*  and  when  the  overgrown  religious  drama 
was  finally  thrust  out  of  the  church  and  confined  to 
laymen,  the  useful  device  of  the  stations  was  taken 


292  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

over  by  the  new  performers.  In  France,  the  passion- 
play  was  presented  on  a  long  and  shallow  platform, 
with  the  successive  stations  ranged  side  by  side  at  the 
back ;  and  they  were  known  as  "  mansions."  In  fact,  all 
the  important  places  in  the  play  were  set  on  the  stage 
at  once,  each  coming  into  use  in  its  turn  and  as  often 
as  need  be,  while  the  most  of  the  acting  was  done  in 
the  neutral  ground  further  forward  on  the  platform. 

After  the  performance  of  the  mysteries  in  Paris  had 
been  confided  to  the  Brotherhood  of  the  Passion,  this 
body  established  itself  in  the  Hotel  de  Bourgogne,  the 
stage  of  which  was  prepared  to  accommodate  as  many 
mansions  as  the  story  might  demand.  In  time,  drama- 
tizations of  the  lives  of  the  saints  followed  the  dramati- 
zation of  the  life  of  Christ ;  and,  after  a  while,  these  were 
succeeded  by  dramatizations  of  the  lives  of  heroes, 
at  first  of  history  and  afterwards  of  romance.  Thus 
the  sacred  drama  gave  way  to  the  profane,  which  had 
been  slowly  developed  out  of  it.  Yet  the  lay  play- 
wrights, though  they  might  borrow  their  plots  from 
modern  legends,  retained  the  medieval  device  of  the 
mansions,  finding  it  very  convenient,  since  it  enabled 
them  to  show  on  the  stage  all  the  many  places  where 
their  hero  met  with  his  manifold  adventures.  How- 
ever incongruous  this  simultaneous  set  may  seem  to 
us,  accustomed  as  we  are  nowadays  to  a  succession 
of  sets,  it  was  familiar  to  French  audiences  and  accept- 
able to  them  well  into  the  seventeenth  century.  But 
in  time,  its  disadvantages  became  more  and  more 
obvious.  The  spectators  who  had  not  found  it  hard 
to  follow  the  well-known  Bible  story  and  to  identify 
the  Temple  at  Jerusalem,  the  House  of  the  High- 
Priest,  and  the  other  mansions  it  demanded,  began  to 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  293 

be  a  little  confused  when  Hardy  put  before  them  un- 
known stories  acted  amid  mansions  only  summarily 
indicated  by  the  carpenter  and  the  decorator.  Hardy 
cluttered  the  stage  with  all  sorts  of  strange  places, 
bringing  together  in  one  play,  a  ship,  a  palace,  a  bed- 
room and  a  cave  on  a  mountain ;  and  the  audience  had 
to  strain  its  ingenuity  to  recognize  all  these  localities. 

It  was  for  a  stage  thus  fitted  up  that  Corneille  com- 
posed the  "  Cid,"  the  action  of  which  takes  place  in  a 
neutral  ground,  backed  by  the  residences  of  the  chief 
characters.  When  he  wrote  this  play,  he  had  never 
even  heard  of  the  doctrine  of  the  unities^  which  had 
been  ignored  by  the  Spanish  dramatist  from  whom 
he  borrowed  his  plot.  He  soon  found  himself  severely 
criticised  for  his  ignorance  of  the  rules  of  the  drama; 
and,  although  his  play  was  overwhelmingly  success- 
ful, he  confessed  his  error.  In  all  his  following  plays, 
he  preserved  the  Unity  of  Place,  discarding  the  medley 
of  mansions  that  he  had  employed  freely  in  his  earlier 
pieces;  and  we  cannot  doubt  that  this  simplification 
of  the  scenery  on  the  stage  was  most  welcome  to  the 
spectators,  who  were  no  longer  forced  to  guess  at  the 
significance  of  accumulated  bits  of  scenery.  And  so 
powerful  was  the  prestige  of  Corneille,  that  his  con- 
temporaries and  his  successors  followed  his  example 
and  showed  one  action  in  one  place  in  one  day. 

Corneille  himself  often  found  it  rather  irksome  to 
conform  to  the  rules;  and  Moliere,  in  his  adaptation 
of  the  laxly  constructed  Spanish  piece,  "  Don  Juan," 
was  forced  for  once  to  disregard  them.  But  they  im- 
posed no  painful  bonds  on  Racine,  who  was  satis- 
fied to  deal  only  with  the  tense  culmination  of  a  tragic 
complication.  What  Corneille  and  Racine  had  done, 


294  A  STUDY  OF  THE  DRAMA 

Voltaire  was  glad  to  do,  although  he  and  his  contem- 
poraries might  be  reduced  to  the  absurdity  of  making 
conspirators  hold  their  meetings  in  the  palace  of  the 
monarch  they  were  leagued  against.  For  two  centuries, 
the  serious  drama  of  the  French  was  chained  in  the 
triple-barred  cage  of  the  unities ;  and  it  was  not  released 
until  Victor  Hugo  brought  out  "Hernani,"  long  after 
freedom  had  been  won  in  other  countries. 

After  "Hernani"  had  blown  his  trumpet  and  the 
hollow  walls  of  classicism  had  fallen  with  a  crash,  the 
doctrine  of  the  three  unities  was  finally  disestablished ; 
and  Mr.  Curdle  is  easily  excusable  for  not  knowing 
exactly  what  it  was.  Perhaps  its  evil  effect  even  upon 
the  drama  of  France  has  been  overestimated ;  at  least 
we  may  doubt  whether  Moliere  and  Racine,  Marivaux 
and  Beaumarchais  really  lost  anything  by  accepting 
it.  On  the  other  hand,  we  have  reason  to  rejoice  that 
it  was  rejected  by  the  dramatic  poets  of  England  and 
of  Spain.  In  our  own  time,  no  playwright  ever  gives 
a  thought  to  the  preservation  of  the  unities.  And  yet 
even  to-day,  when  a  dramatist  is  dealing  with  the  re- 
sult of  a  long  series  of  events,  and  when  he  seeks  to 
set  this  forth  as  simply  and  as  strongly  as  he  can,  we 
are  likely  to  find  him  compacting  his  single  action 
into  a  single  day  and  setting  it  in  a  single  place.  This 
is  what  the  younger  Dumas  did  in  "  Francillon,"  and 
what  Ibsen  did  in  "  Ghosts  ";  probably  either  of  them 
would  have  been  not  a  little  surprised  if  he  had  been 
told  that  in  these  plays  he  had  preserved  the  unities. 

This  unconscious  compliance  of  two  practical  play- 
wrights of  the  nineteenth  century  with  the  theoretical 
precepts  of  the  dogmatic  critics  of  the  sixteenth  and 
seventeenth  centuries,  suggests  that  there  is,  after  all, 


THE  THREE  UNITIES  295 

something  to  be  urged  in  behalf  of  the  three  unities. 
They  represent  an  effort  toward  simplicity  of  plot 
and  toward  logic  of  structure,  two  qualities  greatly 
needed  by  the  drama  in  its  semi-medieval  condition. 
That  the  effort  was  unfortunately  misdirected  is  not 
to  be  denied ;  yet  it  had  a  worthy  motive. 


APPENDIX 


APPENDIX 


SUGGESTIONS   FOR  STUDY 

IT  may  be  well  to  suggest  a  series  of  questions  which  the 
student  can  put  to  himself  when  he  begins  to  study  any  play, 
ancient  or  modern. 

A.  Has  this  play  a  single  plot?  —  or  is  the  story  double 
or  even  treble  ?  If  there  is  more  than  one  story,  which  is 
the  main-plot  ?    Is  the  under-plot  worked  into  the  structure 
of  the  play,  or  is  it  independent,  being  merely  juxtaposed  ? 
Does  the  existence  of  more  than  one  plot  divide  the  interest 
of  the  play,  or  scatter  it,  or  does  the  under-plot  sustain  the 
main  story  by  adroit  contrast  ?     Does  the  play  contain  any 
non-dramatic  elements,  epic  or  lyric,  oratorical  or  descrip- 
tive ?   If  so,  to  what  extent  do  these  interfere  with  the  dra- 
matic interest? 

B.  Has  the  play  an  essential  struggle  sustaining  it  from 
beginning  to  end?    If  so,  what  is  this  struggle?    By  what 
characters  is  this  struggle  maintained  on  the  one  side  and  on 
the  other  ?  Are  both  opponents  justified  in  their  own  minds  ? 
Or  is  one  of  them  absolutely  right  and  the  other  absolutely 
wrong  ?    With  which  character  do  you  find  yourself  sympa- 
thizing ?  Why  ?  Does  the  outcome  of  the  struggle  satisfy  you  ? 
If  not,  why  not  ?  Has  the  author  played  fair  with  his  charac- 
ters ?  Or  has  he  obviously  intervened  to  make  them  do  what 
they  would  not  do  ?  And,  if  so,  has  this  interfered  with  your 
interest  in  the  play? 

C.  What  happened  before  the  play  began  ?  At  what  point 
in  the  story  does  the  author  choose  to  begin  and  at  what 
point  to  end  ?  Why  did  he  choose  between  these  points  of 


300  APPENDIX 

beginning  and  ending  ?  Was  he  well  advised  in  both  choices  ? 
How  has  he  conveyed  to  you  what  you  need  to  know  about 
the  past  to  enable  you  to  follow  the  play  from  the  begin- 
ning? What  is  his  method  of  exposition?  Has  he  massed 
his  necessary  explanations  in  the  earlier  scenes?  or  has  he 
reserved  some  interesting  disclosures  for  later  acts  ?  If  so, 
was  he  right  in  so  doing?  Has  he  failed  to  tell  you,  early 
in  the  play,  anything  that  you  would  have  liked  to  know 
then  to  appreciate  better  what  was  being  done  on  the  stage  ? 
Does  he  at  any  time  violate  the  principle  of  Economy  of 
Attention  ? 

D.  What  is  the  main  theme  ?  Is  this  held  to  unswervingly  ? 
Or  does  the  story  digress  into  by-paths  ?   Does  the  play  con- 
tain any  scene  which  could  be  omitted  ?    If  so,  why  was  it 
inserted  ?    Does  the  author  fail  to  present  any  scene  which 
he  ought  to  have  shown  in  action  ?    If  so,  can  you  discover 
any  sound  reason  for  this  omission  ?    Has  he  led  you  to  ex- 
pect any  scene  which  he  has  not  given  you  ? 

E.  Does  the  interest  of  the  play  rise  steadily  from  the 
beginning  to  the  end  ?    If  not,  where  does  it  droop  ?    And 
what  is  the  cause  of  this  flagging  in  each  case  ?    Draw  the 
diagram  of  interest  and  use  it  to  aid  you  in  your  analysis. 

F.  What  dramatic  conventions  does  the  author  avail  him- 
self of  ?  Which  of  these  are  permanent  and  necessary  ?  Which 
of  them  are  temporary  and  peculiar  to  the  theater  of  his  day  ? 
Has  he  a  chorus  ?  If  so,  what  is  the  function  of  this  chorus  ? 
Does  he  employ  the  soliloquy?    If  so,  is  it  for  constructive 
purposes,  to  tell  you  facts  ?  Or  is  it  only  to  reveal  the  thoughts 
of  a  character  alone  on  the  stage  ?    Does  he  use  asides  ad- 
dressed directly  to  the  audience  ?    Does  he  employ  the  de- 
vice of  eavesdropping?  And  in  these  things  is  he  merely 
accepting  the  traditions  of  his  immediate  predecessors  ?    In 
other  words,  how  far  is  his  method  of  construction  influenced 
by  the  conditions  of  the  actual  theater  of  his  own  time  ? 

G.  Do  you  discover  or  suspect  any  evidence  that  the  au- 
thor had  any  special  actors  in  mind  in  composing  his  play  ? 
Is  there  anything  said  or  done  by  any  character  which  is  the 
result  of  the  fitting  of  that  part  to  the  original  performer? 


APPENDIX  301 

And  if  so,  does  this  help  you  to  understand  better  the  au- 
thor's intent? 

H.  What  evidence  do  you  discover  that  the  author  had 
in  mind  the  opinions  or  even  the  prejudices  of  his  contempo- 
raries, of  the  audiences  of  his  own  time  ?  Is  there  any  overt 
appeal  to  the  playgoers  of  that  period  and  of  that  time  ?  Is 
there  any  frank  claptrap  ?  What  light  does  the  contents  of 
this  play  cast  on  the  manners,  the  customs,  and  the  beliefs 
of  the  people  for  whom  it  was  originally  written  ?  Is  it  local 
and  temporary  in  its  appeal,  or  permanent  and  universal  ? 

/.  Is  the  play  really  a  picture  of  life?  Are  the  characters 
veracious  ?  Could  they  have  existed  ?  If  so,  would  they  have 
acted  as  they  do  in  the  play  ?  Is  the  conduct  of  the  plot  co- 
herent and  logical  ?  Is  the  end  inevitable  or  is  it  arbitrary  ? 
Is  the  story  warped  by  the  obvious  effort  of  the  author  ?  Does 
casual  accident  affect  the  plot  ?  If  so,  could  this  have  been 
avoided  ?  Ought  it  to  have  been  avoided  ?  Is  there  any  ar- 
bitrary character  ?  If  so,  does  this  interfere  with  your  interest  ? 
And  if  it  does  not,  why?  Are  there  carefully  contrived  co- 
incidences ?  If  so,  are  they  so  brought  about  as  to  seem 
natural  in  the  play  ?  And  how  is  this  accomplished  ? 

J.  What  was  the  author's  aim  in  writing  the  play  ?  Did  he 
set  out  merely  to  present  the  several  facets  of  a  single  char- 
acter to  whom  all  the  others  are  subordinate  ?  Did  he  intend 
to  present  primarily  a  picture  of  life,  as  it  is  or  as  it  might 
be?  Did  he  have  an  ulterior  object,  a  thesis  to  sustain? 
Does  the  play  prove  anything  ?  If  so,  was  this  the  author's 
deliberate  intent  ?  Or  was  this  merely  incidental  to  his  pic- 
ture of  life  ?  Has  the  play  a  moral  value  ?  What  effect  had  it 
on  you  ?  Did  it  uplift  or  depress  you  ? 

K.  Does  this  play  conform  to  the  Unity  of  Action?  To 
the  Unity  of  Place  ?  To  the  Unity  of  Time  ?  If  it  does  con- 
form to  any  one  of  these,  why  ?  And  was  the  conformation 
advisable  ?  Did  the  play  gain  or  lose  thereby  ?  Does  it  con- 
form to  the  theory  of  poetic  justice  ?  If  not,  ought  it  to  have 
done  so  ?  Does  the  author  unduly  sympathize  with  any  one 
of  the  characters  ?  Does  he  dislike  any  one  of  them  ?  If  so, 
does  this  help  or  hurt  the  play  as  a  whole  ? 


302  APPENDIX 

L.  Can  you  classify  the  play  easily  ?  —  that  is  to  say,  is  it 
a  tragedy  or  a  melodrama,  a  comedy  or  a  farce,  a  chronicle- 
play  or  a  dramatic-romance,  a  romantic-comedy  or  a  comedy- 
of-manners  ?  Or  is  it  commingled  of  two  or  more  types  ?  If 
so,  what  are  these  types  ?  And  does  this  departure  from  the 
strict  type  interfere  with  your  pleasure  ?  Does  the  author 
indulge  in  mote  d' esprit?  Does  he  reveal  character  by  mots 
de  caractere  ?  Is  he  happy  in  finding  mots  de  situation  ? 

II 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL   SUGGESTIONS 

IN  the  preceding  pages,  stress  has  been  laid  upon  the  fact 
that  the  art  of  the  drama  has  essential  principles  which  are  the 
same  throughout  the  ages.  The  conditions  of  performance 
may  change  and  the  desires  of  different  audiences  may  differ 
wholly,  but  the  dramatist  has  ever  to  conform  to  the  same 
code.  This  being  the  case,  there  is  profit  in  considering  the 
drama  as  a  whole,  and  in  comparing  the  plays  produced 
in  different  periods  and  by  different  people.  The  following 
list  of  plays  has  been  drawn  up  to  facilitate  this  comparison, 
and  to  help  the  student  to  attain  a  perspective  of  the  develop- 
ment of  the  drama.  The  historical  evolution  of  the  art  of 
the  playwright,  with  incidental  criticism  of  the  successive 
masters  of  dramaturgy,  has  been  outlined  in  my  own  volume 
of  lectures  on  the  Development  of  the  Drama  (Scribners, 
1903). 

For  an  understanding  of  the  theatrical  performances  in 
Greece,  see  Barnett's  Greek  Drama  (Dent,  1900);  Haigh's 
Attic  Theater  (Macmillan,  3d  ed.,  1908);  and  also  Haigh's 
Tragic  Drama  of  the  Greeks  (Macmillan,  1899).  There  are 
many  translations  of  the  surviving  plays  of  the  Greek  dra- 
matists, some  of  them  published  in  cheap  editions.  The  Sup- 
pliants of  JEschylus,  although  not  one  of  his  best  plays,  is 
interesting  as  illustrating  the  growth  of  an  actual  drama  out 
of  the  earlier  chorus.  His  two  most  important  plays  are  the 
Prometheus  Bound  and  the  Agamemnon.  The  (Edipus  the 


APPENDIX  303 

King  of  Sophocles  was  held  by  Aristotle  to  be  the  most  mas- 
terly of  all  the  Attic  tragedies ;  and  second  to  it  is  the  Antig- 
one. Of  Euripides,  the  Medea  and  the  Alcestis  are  the  most 
characteristic.  Perhaps  the  Frogs  is  the  easiest  understood 
of  all  the  lyrical  burlesques  of  Aristophanes,  since  its  theme 
is  literary  rather  than  political.  The  best  translation  of  the 
masterpiece  of  Greek  criticism  is  in  Butcher's  Aristotle's 
Theory  of  Poetry  and  Fine  Art  (Macmillan,  2d  ed.,  1898). 

Unfortunately  no  complete  play  of  Menander's  has  sur- 
vived. In  M.  Collins's  volume  on  Plautus  and  Terence  in 
the  Ancient  Classics  for  English  Readers,  there  are  abstracts 
of  all  their  plays  with  abundant  quotation.  Perhaps  the 
Captives,  although  not  characteristic,  is  the  play  of  Plautus 
most  likely  to  amuse  modern  readers.  The  Aulularia  might 
also  be  read,  as  well  as  the  Andria  of  Terence. 

Horace's  "Art  of  Poetry"  is  to  be  found  in  any  transla- 
tion of  his  poems ;  but  it  is  accessible  also  with  the  poems 
of  Vida  and  Boileau  in  Cook's  Art  of  Poetry  (Ginn  &  Co., 
1892). 

The  most  accessible  translation  of  Seneca's  plays  is  that 
by  Professor  Miller  (University  of  Chicago  Press,  1908), 
with  a  preface  by  Professor  Manly.  See  also  Cunliffe's  In- 
fluence of  Seneca  on  the  English  Drama  (1893).  There  is  no 
single  book  describing  the  organization  of  the  Roman  thea- 
ter corresponding  to  Haigh's  Attic  Theater. 

But  Chambers's  Medieval  Stage  (Clarendon  Press,  1903) 
traces  admirably  the  successive  steps  by  which  the  modern 
drama  was  evolved  out  of  the  ritual  of  the  church.  And  the 
actual  text  of  the  earliest  dramatic  attempts  are  collected 
in  two  volumes  of  Manly's  Specimens  of  Pre-Shaksperean 
Drama  (Ginn,  1900).  A  briefer  selection,  with  a  useful  in- 
troduction, is  Pollard's  English  Miracle  Plays  (Clarendon 
Press,  5th  ed.,  1909). 

The  most  important  plays  of  the  Elizabethan  dramatists 
can  be  found  in  Gollancz's  Temple  Dramatists,  Baker's 
Belles  Lettres  Series,  and  the  Mermaid  Series ;  and  the  one- 
volume  selection  by  Professor  Neilson,  Chief  Elizabethan 
Dramatists,  excluding  Shakspere  (Hough ton  Mifflin  Com- 


304  APPENDIX 

pany,  1910),  will  be  sufficient  for  most  readers.  Neilson's  one- 
volume  edition  of  Shakspere  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company, 
1906)  can  also  be  highly  recommended,  especially  because 
of  its  indication  that  the  customary  division  into  acts  and 
scenes  is  unwarranted.  Perhaps  the  most  useful  edition  of 
Shakspere  in  separate  volumes  is  Clark  and  Porter's  First 
Folio  Edition  (Crowell).  Sufficient  abstracts  from  the  Res- 
toration Playwrights  can  be  found  in  Crawfurd's  English 
Comic  Dramatists  (Appleton,  1884)  in  connection  with  which 
attention  must  be  called  to  Lamb's  essay  on  "Artificial 
Comedy"  and  to  Macaulay's  answer,  the  "Comic  Dra- 
matists of  the  Restoration."  The  later  dramatic  authors  of 
the  English  language  are  accessible  in  the  Mermaid  Series 
and  in  the  Belles  Lettres  Series. 

The  plays  of  the  contemporary  dramatists  are  now  gen- 
erally published,  although  not  always  in  satisfactory  edi- 
tions. Unfortunately  Mr.  Barrie  has  so  far  refused  to  put 
his  comedies  into  print.  Perhaps  the  most  significant  of 
these  modern  plays  are  Pinero's  Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray 
and  the  Benefit  of  the  Doubt,  Jones's  Liars  and  Mrs.  Dane's 
Defence,  Shaw's  Candida  and  You  Never  can  Tell,  Bron- 
son  Howard's  Kate,  Clyde  Fitch's  Climbers,  and  Augustus 
Thomas's  Arizona. 

The  masterpiece  of  French  farce  is  Master  Pierre  Patelin, 
translated  byHolbrook  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company,  1903). 
There  are  several  complete  translations  of  Moliere,  but  Pro- 
fessor Page's  two  volumes  containing  the  more  important 
plays  (Putnam's,  1908)  surpass  all  their  predecessors.  Of 
Corneille  and  of  Racine,  there  are  no  complete  translations 
in  English,  but  separate  pieces  can  be  found  in  Great  Plays : 
French  and  German  (Appleton,  1901).  Translators  have  also 
failed  to  provide  adequate  English  versions  of  the  comedies 
of  Beaumarchais,  of  Scribe,  of  Augier,  and  of  the  two  Dumas. 
The  lyrical  melodramas  of  Victor  Hugo  are  included  in  the 
more  or  less  complete  translations  of  his  works.  And  there 
are  several  versions  of  Rostand's  Cyrano  de  Bergerac. 

Lope  de  Vega  has  tempted  few  translators,  but  one  of  his 
comedies  can  be  found  in  the  Drama,  edited  by  Alfred  Bates 


APPENDIX  305 

(1903).  FitzGerald  made  free  renderings  of  Six  Dramas  of 
Calderon  ;  and  there  are  translations  of  other  of  Calderon's 
plays  by  Denis  Florence  MacCarthy.  Life  is  a  Dream  and 
the  Alcalde  ofZalamea  are  characteristic  examples  of  Calder- 
on's method.  Of  the  contemporary  Spanish  dramatists,  only 
Echegaray  is  represented  in  English;  his  Gran  Galeotto  is 
most  noteworthy.  There  is  an  account  of  the  Italian  comedy- 
of-masks  in  the  introduction  to  Symonds's  translation  of 
the  memoirs  of  Carlo  Gozzi.  Several  of  D'Annunzio's  plays 
are  available  in  English,  especially  the  Gioconda  and  Jorio's 
Daughter. 

There  are  translations  of  the  works  of  Goethe  and  Schiller, 
which  include  their  chief  plays.  Perhaps  the  most  note- 
worthy are  Goethe's  Gotz  von  Berlichingen  and  Schiller's 
Robbers  and  Don  Carlos.  Of  the  contemporary  German  play- 
wrights, Sudermann  and  Hauptmann  are  the  most  important. 
There  are  English  translations  of  Sudermann's  Magda  and 
the  Joy  of  Living  and  of  Hauptmann's  Weavers  and  Han- 
nele. 

Archer's  edition  of  Ibsen  now  includes  nearly  all  the  plays, 
both  in  prose  and  in  verse;  the  characteristics  of  Ibsen's 
method  are  revealed  in  the  DolUs  House,  in  Hedda  Gabler, 
and  in  Ghosts.  Bjornson's  Beyond  Human  Power  and  Glove 
also  exist  in  English  translations. 

Spingarn's  Literary  Criticism  in  the  Renaissance  (Colum- 
bia University  Press,  2d  ed.,  1908)  discusses  the  dramatic 
theories  which  resulted  in  the  establishment  of  the  classicist 
formula  in  France.  The  English  translation  of  d'Aubignac, 
entitled  the  Whole  Art  of  the  Stage,  is  scarce ;  but  it  is  often 
to  be  found  in  the  larger  libraries.  Lessing's  Hamburg 
Dramaturgy  is  included  in  the  Bonn  Series;  it  prepared  the 
way  for  Schlegel's  lectures  on  Dramatic  Literature  (also  in  the 
Bohn  Series),  which  is  still  useful,  although  unduly  polemic 
in  its  hostility  to  the  French.  There  is  an  inadequate  Eng- 
lish version  of  Freytag's  Technic  of  the  Drama  (McClurg, 
1895) .  Later  books  dealing  with  dramatic  theory  are  Jerome's 
Play-writing  (reprinted  from  the  Stage,  1888) ;  Hennequin's 
Art  of  Playwriting  (Houghton  Mifflin  Company,  1890); 


306  APPENDIX 

Calmour's  Practical  Playwriting  (Arrowsmith,  1891) ;  Price's 
Technique  of  the  Drama  (Brentano,  1892)  ;  F.  Archer's  How 
to  write  a  Good  Play  (Sampson  Low,  1892) ;  Woodbridge's 
Drama;  its  Law  and  Technique  (Allyn  &  Bacon,  1898); 
Price's  Analysis  of  Play  Construction  and  Dramatic  Prin- 
ciple (published  by  the  author,  1908) ;  Caffin's  Appreciation 
of  the  Drama  (Baker  &  Taylor,  1908) ;  and  Clayton  Ham- 
ilton's Theory  of  the  Theater  (Holt,  1910). 

For  an  insight  into  the  principles  of  the  art  of  acting,  which 
is  so  closely  allied  to  the  art  of  playwriting,  the  student  may 
be  referred  to  Lewes's  Actors  and  the  Art  of  Acting  (Smith, 
Elder,  1875,  now  accessible  also  in  the  Tauchnitz  collection) ; 
and  Colley  Gibber's  Apology  and  Joseph  Jefferson's  Auto- 
biography. See  also  Archer's  Masks  or  Faces  (Longmans, 
1888). 

For  a  longer  discussion  of  the  non-literary  qualities  of 
the  drama,  the  reader  may  be  referred  to  my  papers  on  the 
"Relation  of  the  Drama  to  Literature"  in  the  Historical 
Novel  and  other  Essays  (Scribners,  1901),  and  to  that  on 
the  "Importance  of  the  Folk-Theater"  in  the  third  edition 
of  Aspects  of  Fiction  (Scribners,  1902).  The  earlier  periods 
of  dramatic  evolution  are  considered  from  the  anthropo- 
logical point  of  view  in  Hirn's  Origins  of  Art  (Macmillan, 
1901),  and  in  Grosse's  Beginnings  of  Art  (Appleton,  1897). 

A  more  elaborate  analysis  of  the  conventions  of  the  drama 
will  be  found  in  a  paper  included  in  my  Historical  Novel  and 
other  Essays. 

Professor  Schelling  has  traced  the  career  of  the  English 
Chronicle-Play  (Macmillan,  1902);  and  in  his  History  of  the 
Elizabethan  Drama,  he  has  outlined  the  development  of  other 
dramatic  species.  To  Professor  Neilson's  Types  of  English 
Literature,  Professor  Thorndike  has  contributed  an  illumi- 
nating study  of  Tragedy;  and  for  the  same  series  Professor 
Fletcher  is  preparing  an  account  of  the  Pastoral. 

In  the  opening  paper  of  A.  B.  Walkley's  Drama  and  Life 
(Methuen,  1907),  there  is  a  consideration  of  the  effect  pro- 
duced on  the  drama  by  the  change  from  the  platform -stage  to 
the  picture-frame  stage.  To  the  Stratford  Town  Edition  of 


APPENDIX  307 

Shakspere,  Mr.  Robert  Bridges  contributed  a  paper  discuss- 
ing the  influence  of  the  Elizabethan  audience  on  Shakspere ; 
and  in  Mr.  A.  C.  Bradley's  Oxford  Lectures  on  Poetry  (Mac- 
millan,  1909),  there  is  a  lecture  on  "Shakspere's  Theater  and 
Audience." 

To  be  mentioned,  also,  is  Karl  Mantzius's  History  of  The- 
atrical Art,  five  volumes  of  which  have  appeared  in  English 
(Lippincott,  1904-1909). 


INDEX 


Abington,  Mrs.,  167. 

Academy  of  Music,  the,  77. 

Accident,  ruled  out  by  Aristotle  and 
Coleridge,  101;  by  the  best  art, 
197,  200;  in  Romeo  and  Juliet.WH- 
202. 

Acropolis,  the,  49,  70. 

Action,  placed  by  Jefferson  above 
literary  merit,  21 ;  is  the  expression 
of  will,  95;  declared  by  Aristotle 
essential  to  tragedy,  101;  the 
drama  a  conflict  (Butcher),  101- 
102 ;  action  and  character,  161, 162 ; 
of  primary  importance,  174;  must 
be  seen  unfolding,  180;  should  sup- 
port the  dialogue,  181 ;  in  Scribe's 
plays,  182;  in  Dumas,  the  elder, 
182;  in  Fedora,  184;  of  characters, 
199,  200,  203;  in  Shakspere's  plays, 
202, 215 ;  in  the  Elizabethan  drama, 
238;  in  the  poetic  drama,  250;  in 
the  modern  drama,  265 ;  in  the  Blot 
in  the  'Scutcheon,  268 ;  in  the  pas- 
sion-play, 291 ;  unity  of  (See  Unity 
of  Action).  (See  also  Human  will, 
Plot,  Scenes  afaire.) 

Actors,  limitations  of,  41^43;  eager- 
ness of,  for  worthy  new  parts,  258. 

Adventure,  the  tale  of,  224. 

Adventures  of  Tom  Sawyer,  the, 
quotation  from,  12. 

^schylus,  17,  19,  58,  79,  165,  186,  232; 
Prometheus  Bound,  58,  146;  Aga- 
memnon, 106,  165,  186,  247,  280-281; 
Persians,  the,  136,  237,  247,  281. 

Aldrich,  T.  B.,  Judith,  262;  Mer- 
cedes, 263. 

Alleyne,  Edward,  32. 

America,  125,  282. 

American  Indian,  the,  133. 

Amsterdam,  267. 

Analogues,  125-126,  129, 141. 


"  Apron,"  the,  61, 62, 63. 

Ara  Coeli,  the,  53. 

Arbitrary,  the,  121, 194, 195,  197,  201- 
210,  219,  221,  240,  242,  244. 

Archer,  William,  quoted,  128. 

Arena,  sports  of  the  Roman,  89-90; 
stage  first  cousin  to,  103;  gladia- 
tors in,  103. 

Aristophanes,  232;  lyrical-burlesque 
of,  117. 

Aristotelian  Unities,  the,  276. 

Aristotle,  20, 21,  88,  101,  102,  141, 152, 
176,  208,  257,  274,  275,  276,  277,  279, 
280,  281,  282,  283,  285, 286. 

Arizona,  13. 

Armada,  the,  96. 

Arnold,  Matthew,  233;  Empedocles 
on  Etna,  253. 

Artificial  light,  45,  46,  48,  59,  60,  61, 
63,  64,  66,  139,  238. 

Aside,  the,  144-145, 148. 

Athenian  (See  Greek). 

Athens,  48, 49,  79,  88,  89,  186,  195, 276, 
285. 

Atmosphere,  in  story-writing  and 
in  drama,  163. 

Attic  drama,  the  (See  Greek  drama). 

Audiences,  Elizabethan,  70,  73,  75, 
91, 113, 123, 140, 165, 189,  195, 204, 219, 
237-245,256,  257,  270,  287;  French- 
and  English-speaking  compared, 
72,  231;  of  Terence,  72;  of  the 
Italian  Renascence,  72 ;  of  Lope  de 
Vega,  72-73  ;  of  Greece,  73,  74,  193, 
195,  209,  239;  modern,  74,  76-78,86, 
145,  150-151,  195,  196,  213,  219,  220, 
270;  sympathy  of,  78,  79,  189,  205, 
206,  220,  228,  230;  characteristics 
Of,  87,  88,  90,  182,  190,  195,  209-210, 
218,  269;  of  Paris,  91;  demands  of, 
98,  105-106,  107-108,  135-136,  139, 
178,  180,  191,  192,  198-199,  217-218, 


310 


INDEX 


220-223,  224,  269-270;  of  Moliere, 
140,  196,  239;  of  Louis  XIV,  145; 
Italian,  174;  of  Plautus,  189;  not 
responsible  for  dramatic  failures, 
222 ;  and  the  supernatural,  224-225 ; 
and  the  morality  of  plays,  226-231 ; 
not  considered  in  the  closet- 
drama,  250-253;  favorable  to  poetic 
dramas,  258,260,  270;  Castelvetro's 
ideas  about,  284;  French,  292,  293. 

Augier,  £mile,  19,  39,  76,  119,  232; 
Gendre  de  M.  Poirier,  the,  75-76, 
104, 118;  Paul  Forestier,  263. 

Augustine,  Saint,  90. 

Baker,  George  P.,  Development  of 
Shakspere  as  a  Dramatist,  113. 

Ballad-opera,  the,  111,  124. 

Ballet,  the,  103. 

Balzac,  Honor6  de,  155. 

Banville,  Theodore  de,  Gringoire, 
40. 

Barrie,  J.  M.,  18, 270 ;  Peter  Pan,  270. 

Bartley,  quoted  by  Planche",  190. 

Beaumarchais,  7,  8,  117,  150,  247,  294; 
Marriage  of  Figaro,  the,  95;  Bar- 
ber of  Seville,  the,  247. 

Beaumont,  Francis,  117,  206,  219. 

Beauval,  Mile.,  33. 

Bejart,  33. 

Bejart,  Armande,  33. 

Bernhardt,  Mme.  Sarah-,  35,  37. 

Betterton,  Thomas,  49. 

Blackfriar's  Theater,  the,  256. 

Boileau,  94,  260,  275,  276,  279,  285; 
quoted,  261 ;  Art  of  Poetry,  the, 
274. 

Boissier,  Gaston,  52. 

Bonaparte,  Napoleon,  38. 

Booth,  Edwin,  139,  167,  168,  216. 

Bradley,  A.  C.;  quoted,  68,  150,  214; 
Hegel's  opinions  on  tragedy,  99- 
100 ;  Shaksperean  Tragedy,  149. 

Brandes,  Georg,  244. 

Brotherhood  of  the  Passion,  the,  292. 

Browning,  Robert,  222, 252, 268 ;  Ring 
and  the  Book,  the,  25;  Blot  in  the 
'Scutcheon,  the,  206,  222,  252,  267, 
268;  Straff ord,  252;  Pippa  Passes, 
269. 

Brunetiere,  Ferdinand,  his  "  law  of 


the  drama,"  93-108;  Annales  dn, 
Theatre,  93;  Epoques  du  Theatre 
Frangais,  93;  quoted,  132,  250-251. 

Burbage,  Richard,  30,  49, 160. 

Burke,  Edmund,  quoted,  1,  90. 

Butcher,  Professor,  quoted,  101-102. 

Butler,  Nicholas  Murray,  True  and 
False  Democracy,  82. 

Calderon,  Pedro,  4, 48,  79,90, 125,  232, 
247;  Alcade  of  Zalamea,  247. 

Campbell,  Thomas,  quoted,  24. 

Castelvetro,  94,  283-284,  285. 

Celler,  Ludovic,  quoted,  64-65. 

Champmeste,  Mile,  de,  34,  43, 160. 

Chance,  201  (See  also  Accident). 

Chapman,  George,  236,  256,  257. 

Characters,  120,  163,  177,  178,  180, 
191-192,  194,  200,  201,  203,  213,  228, 
247;  asfound  in  farce,  tragedy,etc., 
121-122 ;  speech  of,  136-138, 139,  141, 
143, 144;  in  Greek  drarna,  146,  159, 
164, 165;  and  the  soliloquy,  148, 149, 
150-151 ;  vitality  of  drama  resides 
in,  153, 154,  160,  174;  limited  means 
of  presenting,  154, 162 ;  must  speak 
for  themselves,  155,  156,  158,  201; 
reality  of  some  famous,  155-156; 
in  French  drama,  156,  157, 159, 182, 
183,  184-185,  205,  255,  288;  relations 
of,  to  plot,  156, 160, 161-162, 194, 224; 
in  Turgenieff's  novels,  157;  in 
Shakspere,  158,  159,  165,  168-169, 
202, 203, 204,  205, 244, 255;  in  English 
drama,  167, 226-227, 236;  transform- 
ation  in,  181, 204, 207,  287  ;  artificial 
use  of,  185,  218;  in  Plautus,  189; 
in  Secret  Service,  196;  isolation  of, 
198,  199;  arbitrary,  202-208,  221; 
truth  necessary  in  drawing,  204, 
219,  222-224;  in  modern  drama, 
265;  in  the  poetic  drama,  267; 
Professor  Lounsbury  on,  267-268. 

Chaucer,  261. 

Children  of  Paul's,  the,  41. 

Chorus,  the,  5,  14-15,  17,  49, 50,  51,  57, 
146,  285. 

Chronicle-play,  the,  17,  97, 102,  111, 
112, 113,  238 ;  purpose  and  charac- 
ter of,  114-115;  examples  of,  115; 
of  Shakspere,  122. 


INDEX 


311 


Cicero,  quoted,  83. 

Cinthio,  Giraldi,  281,285;  Discourse 
on  Comedy  and  Tragedy,  281. 

Classification,  need  of,  110,  114; 
place  and  purpose  of,  124;  as  de- 
vised by  the  French,  126. 

Closet-drama,  the,  26,  80,  111,  266, 
276;  general  discussion,  250-261. 

Coleridge,  Samuel  Taylor,  101,  111, 
252;  quoted,  99,  278-279;  Remorse, 
252. 

Collier,  Jeremy,  quoted,  272. 

Collins,  Wilkie,  193. 

Colosseum,  the  (See  Arena). 

Comedie-Fran9aise,  the,  52,  81. 

Comtdie-larmoyante,  the,  124. 

Comedies,  the,  of  Barrie  and  Shaw, 
18 ;  of  Sheridan,  48, 127, 138 ;  of  Ter- 
ence, 52,  72 ;  of  Moliere,  7,  65, 69-70, 
137;  English,  41,  78;  French,  75; 
of  Plautus,  125;  of  Augier,  76;  of 
Oscar  Wilde,  127;  of  Shakspere, 
119,  122,  124,  130;  of  Ben  Jonson, 
119,  289;  of  Congreve,  138;  of  Du- 
mas fils,  128 ;  of  the  Greeks  and 
Romans,  144. 

Comedy,  100,  103,  113,  115,  117,  118, 
120-121,  123,  124,  151,  192,  196,  224; 
denned,  96;  English,  7,  41,  83,  127, 
226-227 ;  French,  7, 124, 142 ;  Italian, 
142;  Greek,  171-172;  Latin,  171-172, 
259,  283. 

Comedy-of-Character,  the,  197. 

Comedy  -  of  -  cloak  -  and  -  sword,  the, 
124. 

Comedy-of -humors,  the,  111,  119, 125, 
126. 

Comedy-of-manners,  the,  7,  118, 
119-120,  121,  197,  221. 

Comedy-of-masks,  the  (See  Italian 
drama). 

Communal  element  in  drama,  the, 
13,  16,  79,  93,  103. 

Confidant,  the,  146. 

Congreve,  William,  48,  119, 128, 138, 
227;  Way  of  the  World,  the,  118, 
127;  Love  for  Love,  130. 

Content  of  the  drama,  the,  217,  222. 

Conventions,  199,  220,  284;  in  Shak- 
spere, 288  (See  also  Traditions; 
also  chap.  vii). 


Coquelin,  34,  36-37,  38,  40,  113,  160. 

Corneille,  7, 17,  26,  59,  80,  96,  137, 138, 
142,  143,  207,  232,  274,  276,  286,  288, 
293;  Cid,  the,  91,  93,  94, 116, 136, 143, 
293. 

Costume-play,  the,  261-262,  266. 

"  Creating  a  character,"  37. 

Criterion  Theater,  the,  77. 

Cueva,  Juan  de  la,  285. 

Cuvier,  Baron,  162. 

Cyprus,  286. 

D'Annunzio,  Gabriele,  67. 

D'Arc,  Jeanne,  78. 

D'Aiibignac,  Abb<§,  94,  276,  285; 
quoted,  69 ;  Pratique  du  Theatre, 
145;  English  translation  of  d'Au- 
bignac,  228. 

Dekker,  Thomas,  235;  Old  Fortuna- 
tus,  235-236;  Shoemaker's  Holi- 
day, the,  236. 

Democracy  of  the  drama,  the,  24-27, 
79-80,  81-82,  85,  89,  91,  282. 

Detective-story,  the,  112, 191,  224. 

Devices,  artificial,  185-186;  of  eaves- 
dropping, 220;  of  Shakspere,  244; 
the  mansions,  a  medieval  device, 
292.  \ 

Diagram  of  interest,  the,  212-217, 
219;  Diagram  A,  213;  B,  214;  C, 
214;  D,  215; E,  215,  218;  F,  216,  218; 
G,  216,  218;  H,  216,  218;  I,  J,  217, 
218. 

Dialogue,  92,  105,  114,  122,  127,  128, 
129,  180,236,251;  classification  of , 
126;  condensation  of,  135, 136,  139; 
of  Ibsen,  137;  of  English  and 
French  dramatists,  137-138,  184; 
of  Sanskrit  drama,  141 ;  as  a  means 
of  exposition,  181 ;  closet-drama  a 
poem  in,  250,  252,  259,  270;  in  the 
passion-play,  291. 

Dickens,  Charles,  126,  175,193,273; 
Barnaby  Rudge,  193;  Nicholas 
Nickleby,  273-274,  294. 

Dick  Turpln,  150. 

Dionysus,  theater  of,  48, 49-61, 58,  65, 
74. 

Don  Quixote,  155. 

Drake,  Sir  Francis,  241. 

Drama,  the,  origin  of,  quoted  from 


312 


INDEX 


Letourneau,  9;  from  Him,  9-10; 

from  Grosse,  10-11 ;  from  Jebb,  14; 

defined,  92-93;    its  kinship  with 

the    "show-business,"  103;    laws 

and  development  of,  125;  in  the 

16th  century,  236,  237. 
Dramatic-romance,    the,     117;    of 

Shakspere,  123, 124,  278. 
Drury  Lane  Theater,  40,  48,  61-62. 
Dryden,  John,  83,  130,  185;  quoted, 

68 ;  Spanish  Friar,  the,  186. 
Ducange,  18. 
Dumas,   Alexandra,  the   elder,  88, 

176,  178,  182,  232;  Napoleon,  115; 

Mademoiselle  de  Belle  Isle,  183. 
Dumas,  Alexandre,  fils,  19,  128,  183, 

184,  196,  231,  232, 294;  Demi^Monde, 

the,  128;  Camille,  183;  Francillon, 

128,  274,  294;  Femme  de  Claude, 

the,  183-184. 
Duse,  Eleanora,  35. 

Eavesdropping,  220. 
Echegaray,  67. 
Eckermann,  J.  P.,  80,  253. 
Edison,  Thomas,  64. 
Egypt,  the  royal  tombs  of,  134. 
Elizabeth,  Queen,  41,  70, 233, 237, 238. 
Elizabethan  audiences  (See  Audi- 
ences). 
Elizabethan  drama,  the,  30,  57,  58, 

79,  111,  119,  125,  214,  265,  282  (See 

also  chap.  xi). 
Elizabethan  dramatists,  the,  19,  41, 

47,  48,  57,  64,  218,  256,  263,  264,  265, 

286  (See  also  chap.  xi). 
Elizabethan  literature,  102,  237. 
Elizabethan  theater,  the,  5,  45,  48, 

49,  55-57,  58,  60,  62,  65,  119,  138,  237- 

238,  239,  265. 
Energy  of  the  English  race,  the,  233, 

234. 
England,  7,  48,  79,  124,  232,  260,  285, 

286,  289,  290,  291,  294 
English    drama,    258-259,    260,    264 

(See  also  Elizabethan  drama). 
English,  theater,  the,  139,  265. 
Essential  principle  of  drama,  the, 

94,  251,  270-271. 
Essential  quality  of  drama,  the,  21- 

22,  92-93,  259. 


Essential  struggle,  an,  218. 

Eton,  41,  42. 

Euripides,  19,  78-79,  181,  232;  Alec* 
Us,  74,  116;  Medea,  74,  79,  155,  181; 
Iphigenia,  74. 

Europe,  72,  285. 

"Exposition,"  defined,  180;  dis- 
cussed, 181-190 ;  clearness  in,  nec- 
essary, 194-195,  213,247;  in  Othello, 
215. 

Fantasy,  in  Shakspere,  225 ;  in  panto- 
mimes and  musical-shows,  226;  of 
Musset,  258,  262;  in  Peter  Pan,  270. 

Farce,  100,  113,  117,  118,  120,  121,  124, 
191,221,224,  262,  291;  defined,  96; 
in  Moliere's  work,  122;  in  Shak- 
spere, 122,  123, 124,  161,  188. 

Faust,  193. 

Fechter,  Charles,  168,  216. 

Ferrier,  M.  Paul,  Ilote,  52. 

Fielding,  Henry,  191;  Tom  Jones, 
191,  193. 

Fitch,  Clyde,  48,  67;  Barbara 
Frietchie,  77-78;  Climbers,  the,  117. 

Flaubert,  Gustave,  230. 

Fletcher,  John,  117,  206,  219;  Faith- 
ful Shepherdess,  the,  116. 

"  Focus,  "the,  61, 139. 

Folk- drama,  literary  drama  devel- 
oped from,  92,  286,  291;  despised 
by  Italian  critics,  282,  283. 

Form  of  the  drama,  the,  217,  222. 

France,  7, 17, 49,  51,  71,  72,  76,  77,  79, 
91,  124,  143,  232,  258,  285,  286,  290, 
291,  292,  294. 

Francesca  da  Rimini,  193. 

Frederick  the  Great,  96. 

Free  will,  belief  in,  favorable  to 
drama,  96;  championed  by  Aris- 
totle, 101 ;  importance  to  drama 
explained  by  Brunetiere,  102 
(See  also  Human  will). 

French  Academy,  the,  91,  274. 

French,  characteristics  of  the,  290- 
291. 

French  drama,  the,  79-80,  102,  124, 
145,  146,  232,  258,  259,  275,  286,  288, 
290-294. 

French  government,  the,  84. 

French  literature,  258. 


INDEX 


313 


French  painter,  the,  quoted,  222. 

French  theater,  the,  143;  tennis- 
court  of  Moliere,  the,  45,  48,  59-60, 
65,  69;  Italianate  theaters  at  Paris, 
'61; 

Freytag,  Gustave,  artificial  pyramid 
of,  213;  Technic  of  the  Drama,ihe, 
213. 

Frobisher,  Sir  Martin,  241. 

Frou-frou  (Meilhac  and  Hatevy),  120. 

"  Function  of  the  crowd,"  the  drama 
as  a,  79,  81,  82,  85. 

Garrick,  David,  34,  167. 

Gautier,  Theophile,  85,  234. 

German  drama,  the,  7,  80, 144. 

Germany,  7, 80 ;  court-theaters  in,  81 ; 
subsidized  opera-houses  in,  81. 

Giacommetti,  Marie  Antoinette,  115. 

Gillette,  William,  196;  Secret  Ser- 
vice, 196. 

Globe  Theater,  the,  58, 143,  153,  238, 
242,256. 

Goethe,  80-81,  96,  194;  quoted,  186- 
187,  253;  Faust,  25,  74;  Wilhelm 
Meister,  quoted  from,  99 ;  Gotz,  253. 

Goldsmith,  Oliver,  113;  She  Stoops 
to  Conquer,  113, 120. 

Gozzi,  Carlo,  on  the  number  of  situa- 
tions in  drama,  193-194. 

Great  Britain,  76, 110,  258. 

Greece,  79, 110, 142,  232. 

Greek  actors,  50-51. 

Greek  drama,  the,  57-58,  74,  79,  89, 
91,  118,  141, 142,  144, 163-164, 171-172, 
232,  237,  265,  279;  evolution  of,  4-5, 
14-15, 17, 145, 285 ;  analyzed  by  Aris- 
totle, 276-277,  280,  282;  the  uni- 
ties in,  277, 279-281, 284-285, 288 ;  the 
trilogy  in,  288  (See  also  Greek 
tragedy). 

Greek  dramatists,  the,  73-74,  101, 
164-165,  280,  281,  284,  288. 

Greeks,  the,  277;  their  good  sense  in 
art,  193,  283;  their  artistic  percep- 
tion, 214 ;  their  tragedy  cannot  be 
imitated,  254;  Sidney's  belief  re- 
garding, 257. 

Greek  theater,  the,  5, 45,  48, 49-51, 53, 
57,  58,  65,  74,  138,  152,  279,  285. 

Greek  tragedy,  57, 89, 96, 110, 163-165, 


213-214,  259,277;  attempted  resus- 
citation of,  253,  254. 

Greene,  Robert,  119,  246,  247. 

Grimstadt,  70. 

Groos,  Professor,  quoted,  103. 

Grosse,  Professor,  quoted,  10-11. 

Gummere,  F.  B.,  quoted,  14;  his 
treatment  of  the  popular  ballad, 
110. 

Gyp,  social  satires  of,  92. 

Haigh,  A.  E.,  quoted,  44;  Tragic 
Drama  of  the  Greeks,  the,  57. 

Hamilton,  Clayton,  quoted,  88. 

Hamilton,  Sir  William,  quoted,  109. 

Hardy,  Alexandre,  17,  293. 

Harrigan,  Edward,  125. 

Harte,  Bret,  228. 

Hauptmann,  Gerhart,  144,  216; 
Weavers,  the,  216;  Sunken  Bell, 
the,  269. 

Hawthorne,  Nathaniel,  Scarlet  Let- 
ter, the,  200,  231,  278. 

Hazlitt,  William,  187,  246;  quoted, 
152. 

Hegel,  99,  101,  102;  quoted  on  tra- 
gedy, 99-100. 

Henry  IV  of  France,  96. 

Henry  VIII  of  England,  238. 

Herkomer,  Sir  Henry,  quoted,  63. 

Heroic-comedy,  the,  37, 113. 

Heroic-play,  the,  111,  124. 

Heroines  of  Shakspere,  the,  30-31, 
158. 

Hervieu,  Paul,  18. 

Heywood,  Thomas,  19;  A  Woman 
Killed  with  Kindness,  19. 

Hibben,  John  Grier,  quoted,  86. 

High-comedy,  the,  118-119,  120,  121, 
223. 

Him,  quoted,  9-10. 

History,  a  type  of  Shaksperian  play, 
the  (See  Chronicle-play). 

Histrionic  temperament,  the,  34,  39. 

Hogarth,  William,  228. 

Homer,  the  poems  of,  74;  Iliad,  the. 
156. 

Hopkins,  Miss  Priscilla,  41. 

Hotel  de  Bourgogne,  292. 

Howard,  Bronson,  128;  Banker's 
Daughter,  the,  76-77. 


314 


INDEX 


Hugo,  Victor,  146, 199,  207,  215,  232, 
234, 257-258, 259,  270, 274, 294 ;  Crom- 
well, 8,  199,  274;  Euy  Bias,  18,  207, 
215-216;  preface  from,  quoted, 
88;  Hernani,  146,  150,  215-216,  258, 
294;  Miserables,  the,  150. 

Human  nature  in  the  drama,  194, 
269. 

Human  will,  mainspring  of  drama, 
94,  95,  98,  100-101,  102,  104,  106,  218; 
Machiavelli's  emphasis  on,  103; 
should  be  spontaneous,  201. 

Huxley,  Thomas  Henry,  255. 

Ibsen,  7,  8,  18,  45,  48,  58,  64,  67,  70,  71, 
125,  137,  144,  181,  196,  205,  207,  208, 
214,  246,  247,  257,  260,  264,  274,  294; 
Ghosts,  7, 116,  181,  214,  247,  274,  294; 
Doll's  House,  the,  107, 207;  Rosmer- 
sholm,  181;  Hedda  Gabler,  205; 
Pillars  of  Society,  208;  Love's 
Comedy,  264;  When  We  Dead 
Awaken,  264. 

Imagination,  110, 191 ;  distinguished 
from  fancy,  111;  necessary  to 
character-drawing,  153,  169;  in 
Shakspere,  166 ;  not  possessed  by 
the  mere  playwright,  170;  in  the 
Elizabethan  poets,  234. 

Inevitable,  in  drama,  the,  200. 

International  formula,  an,  67. 

Invention,  191;  necessary  to  plot- 
making,  153;  to  the  mere  play- 
wright, 170. 

Irving,  Sir  Henry,  39-40,  138, 168. 

Isocrates, 70. 

Italian  drama,  7;  popular,  despised 
by  Italian  critics,  282-283;  com- 
edy-of-masks,  the,  47,  59,  117,  142, 
172-174,  259,  282,  283. 

Italian  Renascence,  the,  art  of,  28; 
scholars  of,  72;  critics  and  criti- 
cism of,  94,  257,  275,  281,  282-283, 
285,  289. 

Italy,  142,  260, 282. 

James  I  of  England,  233. 
James,  Henry,  223;  quoted,  176. 
James,  William,  quoted,  11. 
Jameson,  Mrs.  Anna,  162;  Girlhood 
of  Shakspere's  Heroines,  the,  158. 


Japanese  theater,  the,  140-141. 

Jebb,  Sir  Richard,  23;  quoted,  14. 

Jefferson,  Joseph,  quoted,  21. 

Jena,  80. 

Jenkin,  Fleeming,  23. 

Jerusalem,  the  Temple  at,  292.  * 

Jewish  theater,  the,  141. 

Johnson,  Samuel,  252;  quoted,  68, 
273,  286;  Irene,  252. 

Jones,  Henry  Arthur,  67;  Evange- 
list, the,  117;  Liars,  the,  118;  Mid- 
dleman, the,  144;  Literature  and 
the  Modern  Drama,  quoted,  261. 

Jonson,  Ben.,  48,  119,  125,  232,  274, 
275,  285,  286,  288,  289;  Every  Man 
in  his  Humor,  29,  289. 

Jordan,  Mrs.,  167. 

Joseph  and  Potiphar's  wife,  72. 

Jusserand,  Jules,  70,  239  j  quoted, 
240. 

Kean,  Edmund,  168. 
Kemble,  John  Philip,  32,  41. 
King  of  Rome,  the,  38. 
Knowles,   J.   Sheridan,    263;    Vir- 

ginius,  261,  264;  Hunchback,  the, 

263. 

Kotzebue,  44,  170,  260. 
Kyd,  165;  Spanish  Tragedy,  the,  18. 

Labiche,  Eugene,  94. 

La  Harpe,  Jean  de,  94. 

Lamb,  Charles,  19,  32,  33,  41,  226-227, 

232,245;  quoted,  159,  227;  Mr.  H., 

191;  Specimens,^. 
Latin  comedy,  171-172,  259,  283. 
Latin  drama,  the,  141,  142  (See  also 

Rome,  drama  of). 
Latin  dramatists,  the,  53. 
Latin  tragedy,  283. 
Lazarillo  de  Tormes,  113. 
Le  Bon,  Gustave,  86;  quoted,  87. 
Legouv6,  39,  42;  Memories  of  Sixty 

Years,  38;  Adrienne  Lecouvreur, 

38;  Louise  de  Lignerolles,  39;  Lor 

dies'  Battle,  the,  247. 
Lemercier,  N^pomucene,  94. 
Le  Sage,  Gil  Bias,  95, 113. 
Lessing,  7,  20,  96,  97,  257,  274,  276. 
Letourneau,  quoted,  9, 89. 
Lewes,  George  Henry,  168. 


INDEX 


315 


Line  of  interest,  the,  212,  213  (See 
also  Diagram  of  interest). 

Literary  drama,  the,  developed  from 
the  unliterary,  8,  17-18;  essential 
qualities  of,  20-23;  denned,  92-93; 
developed  from  folk-drama,  92, 
283,  286,  291. 

Literature  and  drama,  1-3,  20-23 ; 
divorced  in  Elizabeth's  time,  237 ; 
in  the  19th  century,  249  ;  closet- 
drama  follows  divorce  between, 
259-260. 

London,  72,  76,  77,  91,  186,  236,  238, 
289. 

London  Assurance,  129. 

Louis  XIV,  45,  69,  139,  144. 

Lounsbury,  T.  R.,  267,  290  ;  quoted, 
267-268. 

Lowell,  James  Russell,  246;  quoted, 
254. 

Lyly,  John,  41. 

Lyrical-burlesque,  the,  of  Aristoph- 
anes, 117;  of  the  Greeks,  125. 

Lytton,  Bulwer,  39 ;  Lady  of  Lyons, 
the,  39;  Richelieu,  39,  261,  264. 

Macaulay,  Lord,  227. 

Machiavelli,  102-103. 

Mackaye,  Percy,  Jeanne  d'Arc,  115. 

Macready,  39,  252. 

Madrid,  73. 

Maeterlinck,  Maurice,  262 ;  Intruder, 
the,  262,  264;  Pelleas  and  Meli- 
sande,  262. 

Mahaffy,  John  P.,  78. 

"  Mansions,"  47,  54,  143,  292,  293. 

Manzoni,  Alessandro,  253. 

Marivaux,  Pierre  de,  294. 

Marlowe,  Christopher,  17,  32,  48,  79, 
232;  Jew  of  Malta,  the,  32;  Tam- 
burlaine,  32;  Doctor  faustus,  247. 

Mars,  Mile.,  39. 

Massinger,  Philip,  246,  247,  263;  Ro- 
man Actor,  the,  247;  New  Way  to 
pay  Old  Debts,  a,  263. 

Medieval  drama,  the,  15-16, 53-55,  72, 
141,  144,  238,  283,  291-292. 

Medieval  theater,  the,  46,  47,  48,  53- 
57. 142,  143. 

Melodrama,  18,  104, 120,  121,  124,  224, 
262;  in  Shakspere,  122;  Hamlet 


developed  from,  165-166;  Hamlet 
treated  by  Fechter  as,  168 ;  in  Chap- 
man's plays,  257;  Hugo's  plays 
modelled  upon,  257-258,  270. 

Menander,  6,  21,  118,  232. 

Mermaid,  the,  289. 

Mimicry  in  children,  11. 

Minturno,  285. 

Miracle-play,  the,  47,  ?38,  259,  282. 

Modern  drama,  the,  67,  114,  141; 
compared  with  earlier  drama,  125, 
265;  disappearance  of  soliloquy 
from,  144;  line  of  interest  in,  213; 
no  excuse  for  closet-  drama  in, 
260;  prose  and  poetry  in,  249-250; 
chief  characteristics  of,  265;  the 
Unity  of  Action  in,  277. 

Modern  dramatists,  the,  48,  60,  63, 
67,  75, 106, 144,  209, 271 ;  their  viola- 
tion of  "rules  of  the  drama,"  94; 
who  have  handled  the  comedy-of- 
manners,  118;  their  avoidance  of 
the  romantic-comedy,  119;  dis- 
card the  soliloquy,  145,  148,  151; 
their  attitude  toward  the  unities, 
294;  compared  with  Elizabethan, 
246,  265. 

Modern  theater,  the,  48,  63,  67,  70, 
119,  138,  139-140,  142,  151,  238,  249, 
265,  267. 

Moliere,  4,  6,  7,  25,  26,  33,  34,  45,  48, 
59-60,  65,  66,  69,  71,  80,  83,  90, 96, 122, 
125,  130,  131,  137,  140,  141,  142,  148, 
149,  155,  156,  157,  159,  161,  163,  166, 
186,  187,  195,  196,  230,  232,  247,  255, 
271,283,293,  294;  Precieuses  Ridi- 
cules, the,  4;  Amour  Medecin,  the, 
4;  Bourgeois  Gentilhomme,  the, 
33,  163;  Tartuffe,  33,  82,  107,  112, 
121,  147-148,  155,  156,  157,  186,  196, 
200,  247, 278;  Misanthrope,  the,  33, 
112, 139, 156,  157;  School  for  Hus- 
bands, the,  60;  School  for  Wives, 
the,  94;  Femmes  Savantes,  the, 
118;  Scapin,  126;  Don  Juan,  136, 
161,  166,  293;  Miser,  the,  150. 

Moliere,  Mile,  de,  160. 

Morality,  in  the  drama,  225-231 ;  in 
prose-fiction,  225,  227,  228,  230-231. 

Morality-play,  the,  17,  30,  111,  119. 

Mot,  the,  12^;  mot  &  esprit,  the,  126. 


316 


INDEX 


127, 128, 129, 130, 131;  mot  de  situ- 
ation, the,  126,  130,  131;  mot  de 
caractere,  the,  126, 129,  131. 

Murray,  Gilbert,  quoted,  229. 

Musical-comedy,  the,  124,  125  (See 
also  Musical-shows). 

Musical-shows,  American,  226. 

Musset,  Alfred  de,  199,  258,  262; 
Brunetiere's  lecture  on,  93;  On 
ne  badine  pas  avec  V amour,  262, 
264. 

Mystery-play,  the,  15-60,  17,  30,  53- 
55,  72,  97,  111,  114, 143,  238,  282,  292. 

Nero,  259,  260. 

Netherlands,  the,  204. 

New  York,  72,  76,  77,  88,  125, 141. 

Nisard,  quoted,  71. 

Norway,  71. 

Novel,  the,  and  the  play,  84,  92,  94, 
95,  97,  99,  154,  158,  175,  178,  179-180, 
190-191,  197-198,  199,  200-201,  223, 
230,  260;  and  the  short-story.  111  ; 
with-a-purpose,  112;  dialogue  in, 
136;  haphazard  character  of  the 
English,  175;  in  the  19th  century, 


Odeon  Theater,  93. 

Oliphant,  Mrs.  Margaret,  191-192; 
Sheridan,  191;  quoted,  from,  192. 

O'Neill,  Miss,  252. 

Opera,  the  convention  of,  134;  Tol- 
stoy's attack  on,  134;  death  toler- 
ated in,  195. 

Opera-bouffe,  the,  124. 

Opera-comique,  the,  124. 

Orange,  the  Roman  theater  at,  49, 
51-53. 

Orchestra,  the  Greek,  49-50, 146,  279, 
285;  the  Roman,  51. 

Orestes,  194. 

Orientals,  have  no  vital  drama,  the, 
96. 

Oriental-tale,  the,  112. 

Origin  of  the  drama  (See  Drama). 

"Pageants,"  54. 
Palladio,  Andrea,  60. 
Pantomime,  denned, 2-3;  skeleton  of 
a  good  play  always  a,  20;  the  con- 


vention of,  134;  British  panto- 
mimes, 226. 

Paris,  38, 70,  72,  76,  77,  88,  91,  142,  186, 
292. 

Parts,  characters  composed  as,  160, 
166-167;  in  the  School  for  Scandal, 
167  (See  also  "  Star-parts"). 

Pascal,  Blaise,  dictum  of,  114. 

Passion-play,  the,  15,  53-55,  141,  143, 
291,  292. 

Pastiches,  253. 

Pastoral- romance,  the,  112. 

Perry,  Bliss,  quoted,  211. 

Phillips,  Stephen,  265-266;  Ulysses, 
115. 

Picaresque-romance,  the,  112, 113. 

Picture-frame  stage,  the,  48,  63-65, 
151. 

Pinero,  Sir  Arthur,  67,  208,  247;  his 
definition  of  comedy,  120;  His 
House  in  Order,  208;  Second  Mrs. 
Tanqueray,  the,  247. 

Pixerecourt,  18. 

Plagiarist,  the  schoolboy's  defini- 
tion of  a,  194. 

Planch^,  James  Robinson,  quoted, 
190. 

Plautus,  41,  53,  73,  125,  144,  171,  181, 
189;  Amphitryon,  116;  Captives, 
the,  142,  181,  189. 

"Play,"  a,  modern  definition  of 
tragi-comedy,  117. 

Plot,  88,  101,  121, 127,  148, 153, 163,  170, 
171,  178,  181,  194,  196,  197,  201,  205, 
208,  219;  in  Shakspere,  147, 165,  187- 
188,  195,  203,  204,  206,  239,  244,  278; 
repeated  use  of  old  plots,  153,  154, 
164.  165,  193-194,  208-209;  relation 
of  character  and,  156,  160,  161-162, 
203;  in  Moliere,  163,  195;  in  the 
comedy-of -masks,  174;  of  the 
Weavers,  216;  in  Elizabethan 
drama,  238;  in  Chapman's  plays, 
257;  Professor  Lounsbury  on,  267- 
268 ;  in  Greek  drama,  280. 

Plutarch,  21. 

Poe,  Edgar  Allan,  193. 

Poetic-justice,  228. 

Poetry,  primitive,  14;  not  a  matter  of 
verse,  260-264,  267. 

Pompeian  pictures,  134. 


INDEX 


317 


Portuguese  drama,  the,  141. 
Preparation,  the  dramatist's  art,  183. 
Prisoner  of  Zenda,  the,  117,  209. 
Probable,  necessary  in  drama,  the, 

200,  247. 

Problem-play,  the,  111 ;  of  Ibsen,  125. 
Prodigal  Son,  the,  3. 
Prologue,  the,  181;  in  Fedora,  184; 

in  the  Captives,  190. 
Prose-Fiction  (See  the  Novel). 
Psychology  of  the  crowd,  the,  86-88. 
Punch  and  Judy,  226. 

"  Quarrel  of  the  Cid,"  the,  274. 

Rachel,  38. 

Racine,  21,  34,  43,  74,  80,  137,  232,  247, 

288,  293,  294;  Phedre,  146,  247. 
Red  Bull  Theater,  the,  256. 
Regnier,  39. 
Rehearsal,  the,  130. 
Rembrandt,  267. 
Restoration,  the,  comedy  of,  7,  226; 

theater  of,  46, 48-49, 61-62, 63, 65, 238. 
Reynolds,  Sir  Joshua,  quoted,  1. 
Richelieu,    Cardinal,    91,    96,    274; 

theater  of,  60. 
Hip  Van  Winkle,  150. 
Robortello,  94,  281 ;  quoted,  281. 
Roman  sculptures,  135. 
Roman  theater,  the,  49,  51-53. 
Romance,  110,  111. 
Romance-of-chivalry,  the,  112. 
Romantic-comedies,  of  Shakspere, 

the,  119,  123,124,278. 
Rome,  drama  of,  89,  91,  129,  144,  259, 

260  (See  also  Latin  drama). 
Roscius,  34. 
Rostand,  Edmund,   37,   58,  67,  113, 

258,  259;  Cyrano  de  Bergerac,  35, 

37,113;  Aiglon,  the,  38. 
Rowe,  Nicholas,  62. 
"Rules  of  the  drama,"  73,  91;  de- 
clared invalid  by  Brunetiere,  93 ; 

compared    with   "  law    of     the 

drama,"  96-97    (See    also    chap. 

xiii). 
Ruskin,  John,  235. 

Saint-Gaudens,  Augustus,  quoted, 
175. 


Salamis,  96. 

Salvini,  Tommaso,  168. 

Sand,  George,  quoted,  230. 

Sandeau,  Jules,  119;  Gendre  de  M. 
Poirier,  the,  75-76,  104, 118. 

Sanskrit  drama,  the,  141. 

Sarcey,  Francisque,  20, 105, 106,  107> 
209,  276;  his  principle  of  the  scenes 
afaire,  105-108,  219;  quoted,  231. 

Sardou,  Victorien,  35,  184,  185, 186, 
204;  Fedora,  35, 184;  Oncle  Sam, 
84;  Nos  Intimes,  184;  Famille  Be- 
noiton,  the,  184;  Theodora,  184; 
Gismonda,  184;  Patrie,  204-205. 

Satires  of  Sheridan  and  Beaumar- 
chais,  117. 

Scaliger,  274,  283,  285. 

Scenery,  5,  45,  46,  47, 49, 50,  51,  55,  56, 
57,  58,  59,  60,  62,  63,  65,  66,  138,  139, 
142,  238,  265,  285,  293. 

Scenes  afaire,  the,  105-108,  219. 

Schelling,  Felix  E.,  114. 

Schiller,  80, 96, 194, 207;  Robbers,  the, 
207. 

Schlegel,  quoted,  99. 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  175;  Woodstock, 
175-176;  Heart  of  Midlothian, 
the,  200 ;  Waverley  Novels,  the, 
260. 

Scribe,  Eugene,  19,  20,  21,  40,  42,  44, 
76,  170,  182,  184,  186,  246,  247,  260, 
Brunetiere's  lecture  on,  93  ;  Ad- 
rienne  Lecouvreur,  182;  Ladies' 
Battle,  the,  247. 

Sea-tale,  the,  112. 

Semi-medieval  drama,  238,  239,  295; 
the  theater,  48,  119,  244,  256,  257, 
265;  playwrights,  240,  246;  audi- 
ences, 242  (See  also  Elizabethan 
drama). 

Seneca,  102,  259. 

Sense-of-humor,  the,  110;  of  Sheri- 
dan, 128. 

Sentimental-comedy,  the,  111,  124. 

Serious  drama,  the,  defined,  95;  tra- 
gedy, as  a  type  of,  117, 118, 121 ;  as 
distinguished  from  melodrama, 
124,  224;  truth  necessary  in,  223; 
of  the  French,  294. 

Sevigne,  Mme.  de,  43. 

Shakspere,  4,  5, 8,  19,  26,  29,  30-33, 34, 


318 


INDEX 


44,  46,  48,  49,  57, 58,  60,  62,  65,  66,  69, 
70,  73,  74,  78,  79,  90,  91,  96,  112,  113, 
114, 115, 119, 122,123, 124, 130,131,137, 
138, 140,  141, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149,157, 
158, 159, 165, 166, 168, 169, 173, 181, 186, 
187, 188, 189, 195, 201 , 202, 204, 206,  213, 
230, 232, 233, 237, 238-239, 242, 243-244, 
247, 248, 255, 257, 258, 260, 263, 264, 266, 
268, 269, 271, 274, 275, 278, 281, 287, 288, 
289,  290;  Hamlet,  18,  20,  29,  30,  32, 
82,  104-105, 112, 124, 136, 139, 152, 155, 
159,  165-166,  168,  169,  205,  215,  225, 
270, 278, 288;  As  You  Like  It,  29,  30, 
31, 105, 128, 140, 157, 168-169,  194, 203, 
204, 263, 270 ;  Measure  for  Measure, 
30,123,  195,  264;  All 's  Well  that 
Ends  Well,  30,  123,  264;  Twelfth 
Night,30,2G6;  Merchant  of  Venice, 
the,  30,  119,  138,  153,244,  268,  278; 
Much  Ado  about  Nothing,  30, 
119,  203,  204,  244,  278;  Titus  An- 
dronicus,  31,  122;  Romeo  and 
Juliet,  73, 136,  150, 173, 174,  187,  201, 
244,  266,  278;  Macbeth,  107, 113, 122, 
159,  188,  200,  225,  239,  263,  278,  288; 
Othello,  107,  121,  122,  147,  155,  157, 
159,  167-168,  169,  181,  187,  188,  191, 
193,  205-206,  215,  231,  239,  243,  244, 
247,  278,  281,  286;  Winter's  Tale, 
the,  117,  123, 153,  154,  188,  204,  278; 
Comedy  of  Errors,  the,  122,  126, 

187,  188-189,  209;  Merry  Wives  of 
Windsor,  the,  122,  161 ;  Taming  of 
the  Shrew,  the,  122;  Troilus  and 
Cressida,  122,  124;  Cymbeline,VZl, 

188,  243,  244  ;    Tempest,  the,  123, 
159,  289,  290;  Midsummer  Night's 
Dream,  123,  224-225;  Falstaff,  131; 
Henry  V,  136;  Julius  Ccesar,  136, 
137,  263,  287;    Richard   III,    143; 
Henry  IV,  161;  Two  Gentlemen  of 
Verona,  204;  King  Lear,  244. 

Shaw,  G.  B.,  18. 

Shelley,  Percy  Bysshe,  252;  Cenci, 
the,  252;  quoted,  229. 

Sheridan,  R.  B.,  7,  8,  40-41,  48,  61-62, 
65,  66,  117,  119,  127, 128, 130,  138, 167, 
186;  School  for  Scandal,  the,  40- 
41,  61-62,  107,  118,  121,  127,  131,  155, 
167,  191-192,  193;  Rivals,  the,  128; 
Critic,  the,  128,  130, 146, 186. 


Short-story,  the,  109, 112;  a  type  by 
itself,  111. 

Sidney,  Sir  Philip,  46,  116,  257,  274, 
282,  285;  Defense  of  Poesy,  the,  91, 
274,  289. 

Situations  in  the  drama,  number  of, 
193-194. 

Smith,  41. 

Social-drama,  the,  104;  of  Ibsen,  7, 

•  18,  71, 137, 196, 207;  of  Hauptmann, 
216. 

Soliloquy,  the,  64,  143-151,  181,  186, 
187. 

Sophocles,  7,  8,  15,  19,  26,  29,  33,  34, 
44, 48,  57,  58, 65, 69,  70,  79, 90, 101, 146, 
159,  160,  165,  208,  209,  214,  232,  247, 
257;  (Edipus  the  King,  7,  52,  101, 
121,  155,  160,  161,  165,  200,  208-209, 
214,  231,  247,  278;  Antigone,  74,  160, 
161. 

Spain,  7,  48,  79,  204,  232,  245,  285,  286, 
290,  294. 

Spanish  drama,  the,  79,  96,  124,  125, 
138,  232,  245,  286. 

Spanish  theater,  the,'48. 

Sparta,  79. 

Spectators,  the  (See  Audiences). 

Spencer,  Herbert,  Economy  of  At- 
tention, 178,  223. 

Spingarn,  281,  283. 

Standardizing  of  the  playhouse,  66. 

"  Star-parts,''  examples  of,  in  plays, 
29-30,  32-43  (See  also  Parts). 

"  Stations,"  54,  143,  291,  292. 

Stendhal,  quoted,  253. 

Stephen,  Sir  Leslie,  quoted,  256. 

Stevenson,  R.  L.,  23;  quoted,  92,  99, 
106, 229;  his  methods  of  story-writ- 
ing, 163. 

Stock-figures,  of  the  theater,  171; 
of  Latin  comedy,  f71  -172;  of  Greek 
comedy,  171-172;  of  the  comedy- 
of-masks,  172-174. 

Stoker,  Bram,  39. 

Subject  of  a  drama,  the,  importance 
of  to  success,  176;  Aristotle's  dic- 
tum on,  176;  in  the  poetic  drama, 
267. 

Sudermann,  Hermann,  247;  Heimat 
(Magda),  75,  247;  Honor,  144. 

Supernatural,  the,  in  Shakspere's 


INDEX 


319 


plays,  75,  159,  224-225;  audiences 
will  accept,  224. 

Swinburne,  Algernon,  235,  245,  257, 
258 ;  Atalanta  in  Calydon,  253,  254 ; 
Marino  Faliero,  256. 

Taine,  H.,  25 ;  quoted,  232. 

Technic,  significance  of,  5-6  ;  com- 
pared with  that  of  the  novel,  175- 
176;  Goethe,  on  Moliere's,  187;  nec- 
essary to  the  dramatist,  217-218; 
not  mastered  by  Tennyson,  252; 
studied  by  real  dramatic  poets, 
260. 

Tennis-court  theater,  the  (See 
French  theater). 

Tennyson,  Lord  Alfred,  40,  46,  252; 
Becket,  39-40, 115, 252 ;  Queen  Mary, 
115. 

Terence,  52,  72,  73.  150,  171. 

Thackeray,  W.  M.,  154,  155, 191,  228, 
230;  Vanity  Fair,  155,  228,  278; 
Henry  Esmond,  191, 193. 

Thebes,  79. 

Theobald,  Lewis,  62. 

Theocritus,  idyls  of,  92. 

Thespis,  17. 

Thomas,  Augustus,  67. 

Thorndike,  Ashley  H.,  117;  Tragedy, 
110;  quoted,  249. 

Tokio,  140. 

Tolstoy,  134;  Anna  Karenina,  200, 
231,  278. 

Traditions,  47,  54,  55,  220,  265;  in 
Greek  tragedy,  164-165,  193;  in 
Shakspere,  288  (See  also  Conven- 
tions; also  chap.  vii). 

Tragtdie-bourgeoise,  the,  124. 

Tragedies,  Greek,  5,  51,  52,  74,  118, 
144;  of  Corneille,  7, 137;  of  Sopho- 
cles, 65,  165;  of  Seneca,  102;  of 
Shakspere,  113,  122,  124,  130,  137; 
of  Racine,  137;  of  ^Eschylus,  165; 
of  the  Romans,  144. 

Tragedy,  97,  104,  111,  115, 116, 117, 120, 
121,  201,  207,  221,  222,  282,  283;  de- 
fined, 95;  Schlegel,  Coleridge,  and 
Hegel  on,  99-100;  Aristotle  on,  101; 
Butcher  on,  102;  development  of 
English,  102 ,  Roman,  129;  classicist 
French,  146;  Secret  Services,  196; 


in  Ibsen,  207;  Bradley  on,  214;  the 

unities  in,  275   (See   also    Greek 

tragedy). 
Tragedy-of-blood,  the,  18,  32, 102,  111, 

112,  115,  122,  123,  124,  241 ;  Hamlet 

developed  from,  165-166. 
Tragi-comedy,  111,  124;    discussed, 

115-117. 

Trilogy,  the  (See  Greek  drama). 
Trissino,  281. 
Troy,  fall  of,  186,  280- 
Tudors,  drama  under  the,  46,  55. 
Turgenieff,    Ivan,    his   method    of 

writing  a  novel,  157  ;  Smoke,  200, 

278. 
Twain,   Mark,   Huckleberry  Finn, 

113-114. 

Udall,  Nicholas,  42;  Ralph  Roister 
Doister,  41-42. 

United  States,  76,  258. 

Unity,  in  dramatic  development, 
46-47;  necessity  of,  198;  of  im- 
pression, in  the  Weavers,  216;  of 
theme,  necessary,  247;  in  Shak- 
spere's  tragedies,  278. 

Unity  of  Action,  the,  275,  277,  279, 

283,  284,  288,  290,  294. 

Unity  of  Place,  the,   59,  275,   283, 

284,  289,  290,  291,  293,  294. 

Unity  of  Time,  the,  275,  279,  281,  283, 
284,  287,  288,  290,  294. 

Unliterary  drama,  basis  of  the  lit- 
erary, the,  8,  16,  17-19,  291. 

Valenciennes,  mystery-play  at,  54. 
Vega,  Lope  de,  4, 48,  66,  72,  73,  79,  232, 

274,  285,  286,  287,  290 ;  New  Art  of 

Making  Plays,  the,  73, 147,  287. 
Verga,    Giovanni,    67;    Cavalleria 

Rusticana,  35. 
Vergil,  jEneid,  the,  156. 
Versailles,  139. 
Vicenza,  theater  at,  60. 
Visualizing  a  play,  22-23,  211,  212. 
Voltaire,  60,  99, 176,  286, 294;  Semira- 

mis,  61. 

Wagner,  Richard,  3;  music-dramas, 

51 ;  Tristan  und  Isolde,  134. 
Waterbury,  Conn.,  139. 


320 


INDEX 


Weber  and  Fields,  Messrs.,  125. 

Webster,  John,  236. 

Weimar,  court-theater  at,  80. 

West  Point,  N.  Y.,  138. 

When  Knighthood  was  in  Flower, 

117. 
Whistler,  James  McNeill,  quoted, 

267. 


Wilde,  Oscar,  127;  Lady   Winder- 
mere's  Fan,  118,  126,  127, 130. 
Will  (See  Human  will). 
Wordsworth,  William,  quoted,  85. 
Wycherley,  William,  227. 

Zola,  Emile,  Germinal,  84. 


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